Works as advertised and looking forward to its potential

When Project Natal was announced in last year's E3, I was intrigued by its technology but was skeptical on whether Microsoft can pull it off, fast forward to this year, Project Natal is now officially named Kinect, and after spending a few days playing it, even though it didn't fulfill all of its promises, it did live up to the lofty expectation.

Kinect is easy to setup, basically you plug it into the XBox 360's USB port and plug in the power (if you have the newer "S" model, you won't even need the power), and once it's set up, it's ready to go, I was surprised on how simple the setup was, it's basically plug-and-play, and it recognize me right away and I can navigate the menu with Kinect without any problem (and yes, it does work sitting down, although all the games I tested are programmed for playing standing up). The only thing that takes a while to set up is KinectID, basically you can set up auto-login based on facial recognition, and that involves making different poses in different position, which my 3 year old son has a hell of a time doing (he just can't stand still to hold the position for Kinect to recognize him), but for us adult, it works pretty well.

I was pleasantly surprised on how accurate Kinect is, and it seems to be able to pick up who is playing even with multiple people in the background.  As you can see from the tracking image, Kinect is able to map out and track your whole body with its built in infra-red cameras.

As for the games, I mainly played a lot of Kinect sport, and it's a pretty fun game, and since Kinect can read your whole body, you can't "cheat" your way through the games like you can with the Wii, and it's a lot more accurate then I imagined, when I played Bowling, you can motion your arm across your body to indicate spin move, and your position and arm motion will determine the path of the ball, it's pretty impressive, and after playing through some sports (Bowling, Ping-Pong, Beach Volleyball, Soccer, and Track and Field), I was actually pretty sore the next day, so you can actually get a fairly decent workout from this.

As of right now, what the Kinect offers is good, but not great, but I think the technology can do so much more, some examples are what some people are doing with Kinect connected to PCs, it's pretty amazing what it can do, and I am looking forward to the next wave of games that taps into the potential of the device more.


Kinect "Minority Report" control on PC (with the open-source driver)