Kinect, which launches Thursday, allows you to pull off some pretty complex stuff you simply couldn’t with a Wii remote or PlayStation Move. For instance: cranking out full-body dance routines, or using your arms, legs and head to plug holes in a leaky submarine. At its best, it’s like having a motion controller strapped to each limb.

The Wii proved that accessible controls can get mom, grandpa and little sis to play games. Microsoft hopes to court those same casual gamers with Kinect, and then encourage them to log into the Xbox Live Marketplace to buy movies and stream music, all of which can now be done without ever touching a controller — at least if it’s not too sunny outside.

Like so many new technologies, 3-D camera control needs lots of improvement before it advances from nifty gimmick to fully functional hardware. The software that drives the current version of Kinect leaves a lot to be desired, and even if Microsoft fixes these early problems, the hardware labors under some perhaps insurmountable limitations.

Kinect: Perfect for Vampires and Night Owls

Let’s get the biggest problem out of the way first: Direct sunlight on your body kills
Kinect. Sunshine doesn’t make the controller slightly less accurate — it completely obliterates the sensor’s ability to see you. I was rocking out to Lady Gaga in Harmonix’s excellent Kinect launch title Dance Central, but as soon as the sun streamed in through my west-facing windows that afternoon, the game couldn’t read my poker face — or my poker arms or poker legs, for that matter.

Closing my blinds helped a little, but the sunlight that shone in through the cracks and hit parts of my body caused me to be invisible in Kinect’s eyes.

Kinect also has some pretty serious space requirements. I am a city dweller with a studio apartment, and even though I have a good amount of distance between me and my television, I barely have enough room to play some games. You need to be at least 6 feet back from the TV and have enough clear horizontal space to play many of the minigames in Kinect Adventures.

For example, I can play Rally Ball, a minigame in which you use your body to play a sort of 3-D version of Arkanoid, bouncing balls into the screen to break blocks. But I pretty much know that if a ball is headed for the lower left corner of the screen, I’m not going to hit it — I’m going to jam my foot into my bed.

Rally Ball is one of the better uses of Kinect I’ve seen, something fun and challenging that’s truly only possible with this hardware. But it is not rearrange-my-furniture fun.

Dashboard Confessional

Microsoft this week pushed out an update to the Xbox 360 dashboard that included the Kinect software. Now, whenever you’re sitting on the 360’s menu, you can simply wave your hand in the air to be whisked off to the Kinect Hub, a separate menu that lets you interact with any of the Xbox features Kinect can currently control.

At this moment, it’s a limited feature set. You can browse and buy movies and shows from the Zune Marketplace, watch on-demand college football and South American soccer on the ESPN3 channel, or stream music from Last.fm.

The channel interfaces use an on-screen cursor controlled by your hand, but while Kinect lets you point, it won’t let you click. So you must hover your hand over anything you want to select, then hold it there until a small meter fills up, indicating your selection. This works pretty well, although it means it always takes longer to do anything with Kinect. Simply pausing a videogame, which is always done by holding your right hand straight down and your left hand at a 45-degree angle, takes about four seconds.

Kinect also utilizes voice commands, which worked with an amazing 100 percent accuracy. I didn’t have to set up this functionality for it to recognize my voice.

However, the voice commands only work for a small set of features, and the single most useful and important voice command any Xbox 360 owner will need doesn’t exist: “Xbox, off.”

Isn’t turning off the machine precisely when you most want to use voice commands? When you’re in bed, having just watched a bunch of Pawn Stars on Netflix, too tired to find the remote?

Speaking of which, I know a lot of people with Xboxes. I have never seen any of them watch movies downloaded from Zune Marketplace. I have seen or heard of almost all of them watching Netflix streaming. Guess what doesn’t work with Kinect? Maybe Microsoft will add support in the next Xbox 360 software update, but until then, Kinect does not work with Netflix, one of the internet’s most popular streaming media sources.

Pages: 1 2 3 View All

Authors: Chris Kohler

to know more click here