Microsoft’s Kinect Fun Labs is supposed to be a place where smaller, experimental little Kinect programs get thrown up on Xbox Live for us to play with. But does it work, and is it really a lab filled with fun?
Kinect Fun Labs is a separate program you launch from the Kinect Hub, and currently has four “gadgets”: Kinect Me, Googly Eyes, Build A Buddy, and Bobble Head. I gave them all two tries, and here are some impressions of the process and end result of each of them.
Kinect Me
Kinect Me is where you scan your entire body (with or without clothes) to create a more lifelike avatar. It feels like a testing ground for the upcoming Avatar Kinect, which is not yet available.
You start by selecting your gender and getting up close to get your face scanned in. Afterwards, you move back a little to fit yourself in a full body outline so it can scan the rest of you. Finally, you choose whether you want to add glasses or not.
The result can be a bit odd. In my case, it scanned the print of PAX shirts for Knights Contract and Fallout: New Vegas pretty well. The resolution of your clothes’ texturing is not very high, but you can recognize it pretty well. For those of us that have favorite shirts that we wear all the time, Kinect Me can give you a pretty accurate representation of your look in that regard.
However, my face looks like I am some kind of insane extra from what would’ve been a mix between the kid on the Mad comic covers and The Goonies. Especially under low-light conditions as depicted below, where I was standing upright and holding a camera. Just look at it! That’s my writing posture right there.
With daylight lighting, my head turned out a little bit better than during the nighttime with artificial light. I never had this issue with other games like Kinectimals or Dance Central, which I only play with the curtains closed so as to not embarrass myself in front of people walking by outside. Then again, those games are about skeletal tracking and not about facial fidelity.
When you are done with what comes the closest to an Avatar version of yourself, or more likely what is the last thing you do before you get tired of Kinect Me, you can select an image to start a slideshow that you can add a voice recording to.
If you want, you can then share it to a private account on KinectShare.com and with your friends. Logging into KinectShare is painless as it uses your Xbox Live account info (the same that Xbox.com uses), and from there you can share it to Facebook.
Your friends who have Kinect Fun Labs will also be able to watch your attempt through a Friends Feed inside the Kinect Labs menu. You can also “like” your friends shenanigans if you want, and watching any of your Xbox Live friends’ posted content makes their Avatar run into the screen. It’s a nice touch, and overall it works pretty well.
The downside of Kinect Me is that this is all you can do with it.
In the end, it’s more of a tech demo than anything else, and if you don’t care about sharing and posting your results to Facebook or the tiny Kinect Fun Labs area of your console environment, you’re not going to use this more than once at best.
Googly Eyes
Googly Eyes lets you scan in any object, slap “googly eyes” on it so it looks like a toy, and then record some movements and voice for a small skit. You start by scanning the front of an object, followed by the back. However, you need a pretty big object for this to work.
I tried to do it with a Togepi figure I have, which was too small. The only way I could make it work is to have part of my hand be included in the image, which turns it into a pretty damn freaky thing. Because it was deemed to small, I put a DualShock 3 controller below him. This worked, although parts of my fingers were still included — it’s hard to hold objects without your hands, you know?
When you are done with this process, the software creates a 3D creature with googly eyes slapped on top of it. You can change the style of these eyes, but they are all googly. Like in Spore, you can also change where the eyes go.
Finally, you can record a little animated sketch. The on-screen creature will follow most of your movements as far as it can (my TogepiShock 3 had no arms, sadly), and you get a couple of seconds to record something ridiculous for your friends. Sharing works like in Kinect Me through the KinectShare website.
Googly Eyes works best with bigger objects and toys and even then there’s not a lot you can do with it except record little sketches. This can be fun for parents with kids to play around with, but most of us won’t care. On the upside, it does save your creations.
Build A Buddy
While Googly Eyes lets you create a sketch, Build A Buddy lets you create more of a virtual pet by scanning objects. Just like with Googly Eyes, I had to work with a Togepi/DualShock 3 concoction because I just don’t have any big toys or fluffy animals lying around.
After scanning the front and back, you have to record yourself saying three lines. Sadly, Kinect Fun Labs is a regional program so I had to deal with Dutch for all of it. When you’re done, you can choose a personality for your critter by choosing between two options for three personality factors.
When it’s done, your new Buddy will want you to train it. Jump, dance, hide your eyes behind your hands, and it will do some silly moves as a result. Finally, it gives you a short animation where it does everything it learned.
It’s kind of cute, and the end result is more fun than what you get with Googly Eyes although the latter lets you customize sketches in more detail if you want to get creative. Your Build A Buddy just goes through the same couple of pre-scripted animations over and over again. They are cute to look at for a couple of times, but the novelty quickly wears off.
If you do have kids, you can “play” with your Buddy after you are done with it. So if they have a favorite cuddly toy, this is a great way for them to play with it. Build A Buddy feels like a more fleshed out version of Googly Eyes in that regard.
It’s a bit odd that Microsoft and Good Science didn’t just incorporate all of it and more into a Kinect Toys game of sorts, because they are so similar and it’s a bit of a hassle to navigate all the menus just to switch between doing a sketch and having a child play with their motion-mirroring toys.
Bobble Head
This is the most basic of all the Kinect Fun Labs playthings. Of all the Kinect Fun Labs gadgets, this one also had the most trouble with lighting. Scan your face and body just like you do in Kinect Me, and choose if you want to be male, female, if you want to have glasses, or a tail. Yes, a tail. You can stop feeling persecuted by Microsoft now, furries!
Because I went with a male character in the Kinect Me, I decided to go for the more lady-like look this time around. After doing the obligatory scanning and posing, you end up with a bobblehead with your face. You can record a voice message so it will play that back when you hover over the head itself. And that’s it — there’s nothing more you can do with it (probably didn’t expect any more, either).
Bobble Head is really a pointless feature and you’re better off not even downloading it to try it out.
Final thoughts
Kinect Fun Labs does offer some messing around for users of all ages, but to call it fun is a bit of a stretch. Kinect Me feels like a prototype of Avatar Kinect, and Googly Eyes and Build A Buddy feel like prototypes of some upcoming Kinectimals “play with your own toy!” first-party title. Bobble Head is just a pointless addition to the three.
It’s still an environment that could bring a lot more of these little gadgets to play with while people wait for actual good Kinect games. And from the looks of this year’s E3, that might take quite a while. In time, perhaps it can grow into something more substantial and Microsoft only really needs one little application that has meme potential to get everyone to make their own version and share it.
Fun Labs also takes a long time to start up and load a gadget, perhaps because it needs to check online friends feeds and whatnot. It’s quite jarring for the experience as a whole, and even though there is a minimum of menus inside all the gadgets — mostly because there isn’t a lot to actually do — you still feel like it all takes too long.
I even had to launch Build A Buddy and Bobble Head from the “download completed” pop-up screen because they wouldn’t get listed in my downloaded gadgets. That is, after trying to redownload them up to four times over the last couple of days. Great fun! At least you get Achievements for each of the gadgets, which is a nice bonus for those that care.
As it stands, Kinect Fun Labs offers consumers some insights into the kind of things that are being worked on behind the scenes. At the same time, it offers the people at Good Science and Microsoft a way for the public to interact with whatever they come up with in early stages and a constrained way to see how the public reacts.
It’s still a very limited environment right now, and if you don’t own a Kinect sensor, Kinect Fun Labs is no reason for you to buy one. If you do own it, you don’t have to share your things with the world to get those Achievements.
