Next week, in living rooms all over the country, people will be leaping around like idiots as they get to grips with the latest innovation in video games – a console that doesn’t require any controllers.
Microsoft’s Kinect gaming system, which goes on sale on Nov 10, is compatible with all existing models of Microsoft’s Xbox 360 games console. It uses a hi-tech camera to track the movement of players and translate gestures in to on-screen movement, doing away entirely with the need for any kind of joystick or game pad.
“With Kinect, you are the controller,” says Alex Kipman, incubation director for the Xbox 360 platform, and the man responsible for turning Kinect from fantasy to reality. “Our vision for this platform was simple yet profound: we wanted to transform not just the notion of gaming, but of entertainment.”
For years, now, gaming has been about more than sitting huddled over a control pad, bashing buttons. The launch of the Nintendo Wii in 2006 changed the perception of gaming, transforming it from a solitary, immature pursuit to an immersive, fun, family-friendly form of entertainment.
Microsoft’s vision was to go one stage further and envisage an age of gaming in which players used their whole body to play a game.
Kinect has been in development for almost three years, and is a technological marvel; the number of hurdles the Microsoft team had to overcome to make Kinect a reality – from learning how to precisely track the erratic and unpredictable movements of the human body, to discerning different voices and accents from the buzz of background noise – is truly staggering, and perhaps something only Microsoft, with its huge resources and vast army of engineers, could have achieved.
The end result is incredibly impressive; Kinect offers an immersive, visceral gaming experience that outstrips anything that’s been achieved up until now. Once you overcome the initial sense of awkwardness that comes from jogging on the spot and leaping over invisible obstacles to compete in a hurdles race, the lack of controller, of any sort of barrier between gamer and game, is liberating.
Everything about Kinect is designed to be controlled through physicality alone; menus are navigated by waving a hand in front of the Kinect camera and then hovering over the option you wish to select. And it’s voice-controlled, too, meaning you can tell Kinect to open its disc tray or launch your music library just by saying the command.
“Think of Kinect as a set of eyes and ears,” says Kipman. “If you can see it, you can say it.”
Related Videos
