We had a look at a rough version of the Kinect Dashboard today. Actually, they started the session by announcing that Xbox Live would be available in 9 new markets: Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Chile, Colombia, South Africa and Greece. So if you live in any of those countries, yay for you. I asked if they were planning to expand into China, but only got the standard PR talk as a result. So, no China or funny comments. Boo for us.
With that out of the way, we got a hands-off showing of how the Kinect Dash works. If you have been following that, there wasn’t really anything new to show. If you haven’t: it’s basically a 4-by-2-window wide Wii Channels design. You hold your hand over a window for 3 seconds to enter. Instead of using the + and – buttons, you hold your hand over the next and previous page buttons at the sides and snap your hand to the opposite direction, like you’ve seen those people do in the commercials.
Kinect Chat is a video chat program: you are in a box on the left and your chat partner is on the right. If someone walks into view as you talk, the screen zooms out to compensate. For when you want to have a collaborative bitch fest about politics, or if you want to hold your own MST3K bad movie night while wearing silly costumes, you can watch news video and other content together.
After being shown what we basically already knew, we were allowed to try the Kinect Dashboard ourselves. Of course, the most important thing was to mess with it as much as I could to try and ruin it. My current 360 setup isn’t very wide, so the first thing I tried was standing about 5 feet from the Kinect camera to see if it registered my hands all over the dashboard. While this Kinect kit was the same as the E3 one — meaning it didn’t have auto-tilting to compensate for your position and it wasn’t calibrated to me — I was surprised to see that it did register my hands for the area I’d use. I couldn’t try then and there whether it would actually work for games, though.
Next up was playing with the Zune feature, which will also have movies in the EU as well as the music content that is currently available. You can use your hand to scroll through the movie at about 3 to 5 minutes per second, with screenshots of the movie for reference. I’d say it had about 1 screenshot for every 5 minutes or so. Unfortunately, there is no way to scroll faster. So if you have Return of the King on Zune for some reason and want to skip to the Battle of Pelennor Fields quickly, forget about it.
Back in the dashboard, I tried to grab the previous and next page buttons with two hands at the same time. It only grabbed the button that I first reached. Trying to using my right hand to grab the left button and vice versa did seem to work, as the camera just tracks your skeletal structure. I wonder how that will work for my Cousin Boneless though.
Standing up and sitting down works as it should. If you move your hand behind the chair you are sitting on, it just makes your hand cursor disappear. Standing behind someone who is sitting in a chair and waving your hands all over the place and in front of his face, makes the Kinect kit crash, though. They had to hold their hand over the camera to make it recognize us again and then it kind of worked.
Until I made it crash again.
And again with some more fooling around with hands up and down and behind objects. Supposedly the retail kit should work a lot better, but it didn’t really inspire much confidence about that.
I asked what would happen if you have, say, two wives and five kids on one couch that is far enough away to fit inside the Kinect camera angle and they’re all pointing at the movie. Would it select a Master user with full control, or would it just go crazy with everyone in view? The Microsoft PR on hand wouldn’t say anything about it, and I didn’t get any info when asking if it was possible to select one person as a Master user who would have access.
If you say “Xbox, take photo”, it takes a photo which you can then share in ways they wouldn’t get into. The logical thing to ask was, of course, “What would happen if you were naked on the couch with your sex partner, and were explaining that ‘It can take a photo if you say Xbox, take photo’?” While they didn’t want to get in to that too much, either, there are actually parental controls that are already on the 360 that will include options for what you can do with Kinect. So getting kids to take pictures of themselves and share it with you will require some effort on your part. This will probably sadden a specific Destructoid IRC user in particular.
So the experience with the Kinect Dash overall was that it will probably work as long as you don’t actively try to mess with it — which you will do on the first day you have Kinect in your home. It works well enough, but I can’t see myself using it when the controller is just faster for everything but taking pictures.
While this was a relatively old version of the Kinect hardware and software, or so they said, there are some things that Nick Burton (Rare) mentioned at a GDC session that did inspire some confidence about the whole Kinect thing. Basically, the Kinect hardware is just a webcam, a depth camera, and an array of three microphones that can be used to cancel out background noise — the rest is all software.
The thing is that for the last couple of years, the Microsoft first-party studios involved with Kinect have been developing and playing around with their own things. For instance, Blitz Games wanted to do a Kinect version of their Biggest Loser Wii game. But Kinect scans your body to create a skeletal representation for tracking and creates a 3D image map of the environment. So if you lie on the floor with your feet towards the camera and want to do push-ups, the cameras will only register your feet, and there is no data to create a workable 3D silhouette of your body. Without getting too technical , Blitz Games managed to make it register enough that the game can see you laying on the floor. Which is another thing altogether: Kinect software didn’t register a floor in the beginning so that had to be coded in as well.
Burton mentioned that first- and third-party developers are likely to be porting all their casual Wii games to Kinect (and Sony’s Move, probably) , constantly creating new software solutions for problems that they encounter. These solutions then get sent back to the Kinect engineers at Microsoft, who then turn their rough but workable solutions into proper integration with the Kinect software. All of that is then put back into the XDK which is available to all ‘Official Xbox Developers.’ This means that while the hardware will probably stay the same for a long time (there is no real interest in a HD camera from the developer side, at GDC at least), Kinect will constantly be upgraded on the software side and via the bi-yearly XBL updates.
What that really means though, is that we just need a couple of developers who want to play around with making a “hardcore AAA” title for Kinect and for them to run into as many problems as possible. Because the more they fail at it, the more solutions they will come up with, which other developers will then be able to use. And the more options and tools developers have at their disposal, the more likely it is that they will come up with something totally new. This is probably going to be a year or so away — at least from the looks of it — but one can hope. Hell, if you don’t like playing sports games with friends or don’t care about realistic fur shaders on animals to tickle, at least by then the price will have dropped.
Fun fact: Nick Burton from Rare joked about a seagull simulator for Kinect where you flap your hands to fly and squat to do a poop. I don’t know if they actually made that for fun, but release that for free on XBLA with 200 in achievements at launch, please!
[Editor’s note: No official images of the Kinect dashboard were provided. Images above are from the leaked shots from July.]
