Some of us aren't so keen on using Kinect for playing most types of games, but that's not to say the technology doesn't have its applications elsewhere. Can you imagine Microsoft integrating Kinect with laptops or tablets? Chief research and strategy office Craig Mundie can. "You want to be as cheap as possible and physically as small as possible," he said this week at Microsoft's TechForum. "My dream is to get a Kinect into the bezel of something like this [Surface tablet]."

For laptops, "It's not gonna happen tomorrow, but we can see a path towards that sort of thing," he commented. The company isn't quite there yet, however: "There's a whole bunch of problems, not just miniaturization, in designing the sensors so they actually do what you expect them to do in all of the environments." Frankly, I'd rather energy be spent here than on cramming Kinect into games that are better controlled with a gamepad.

Microsoft shows displays with built-in Kinect, predicts future laptop integration [The Verge]