Xbox Kinect - How to jump around your lounge and be mocked by a gaming console.
Well I picked up my Xbox Kinect on the 18th November (Release day here in New Zealand), I have to say after a little configuration getting it to track and facially recognise me I am very impressed.
It is very responsive to my body movements much more than I had expected and the way it controls the xbox interface... fantastic... I have been waiting for minority report gesture style interfaces to hit consumer-land (minus Tom).
I spent the rest of the evening jumping about my lounge playing the included "Kinect Adventures" game which during the game play has you jumping, leaning, ducking and making strange gestures at your TV, all while secretly taking your photo while in weird posses which is then plays back to you at the end of your game. Am I being mocked by my gaming console? But all in good fun!The Kinect also brings to the table a video calling option to video call your friends and family who also have Kinect (Of course a gold xbox live account is required). I have also thought bringing video conference style video calling to the lounge space was a good idea seeing you normally have the biggest screen in the house parked in your lounge. Im hoping that perhaps they could bring Skype to the xbox... that would be the killer app!
I couple of small gripes though, the speech recognition does not function yet in New Zealand... perhaps our accent is all a bit too "fush and chups" for it. I imagine this will eventually be turned on with a software update at some point down the line?
Also it would be nice to be able to navigate my music and video collect on my usb hard drive with this interface... alas... no... it all seems geared towards you purchasing movies from the Zune marketplace which is well overpriced in New Zealand not to mention the huge bandwidth required to actually get your movie (Around 1.8Gb for an SD, 7-8 Gb for 1080 HD) with most Telcos in NZ still selling their broadband connections on "Huge 3Gb bandwidth" this is really going to blow your cap out!
Still its early days for Kinect in New Zealand, once we get a fat fibre pipe across the Pacific to the States and broadband becomes cheaper and faster I feel we will see more of this type of technology in more homes for entertainment and communication.
Well I picked up my Xbox Kinect on the 18th November (Release day here in New Zealand), I have to say after a little configuration getting it to track and facially recognise me I am very impressed. It is very responsive to my body movements much more than I had expected and the way it controls the xbox interface... fantastic... I have been waiting for minority report gesture style interfaces to hit consumer-land (minus Tom). I couple of small gripes though, the speech recognition does not function yet in New Zealand... perhaps our accent is all a bit too "fush and chups" for it. I imagine this will eventually be turned on with a software update at some point down the line? Also it would be nice to be able to navigate my music and video collect on my usb hard drive with this interface... alas... no... it all seems geared towards you purchasing movies from the Zune marketplace which is well overpriced in New Zealand not to mention the huge bandwidth required to actually get your movie (Around 1.8Gb for an SD, 7-8 Gb for 1080 HD) with most Telcos in NZ still selling their broadband connections on "Huge 3Gb bandwidth" this is really going to blow your cap out! Still its early days for Kinect in New Zealand, once we get a fat fibre pipe across the Pacific to the States and broadband becomes cheaper and faster I feel we will see more of this type of technology in more homes for entertainment and communication.
The Boxee Box is something I have followed for a number of years and is the first release of the Boxee software in a dedicated hardware device.
Boxee is one of the best open source media centre software apps I have used, it plays virtually anything thrown at it and what I like best is that it pulls related material from the web to augment the media you are watching.
It also pulls the best of the web video channels and puts them into an easy to master interface, whether you like to watch a lot of YouTube or TED talks you can find and watch this content all through Boxee.
The hardware brings a ready to go media centre with an HDMI port to the party. Produced by D-Link (Who make a lot of routers and other IT equipment) the hardware sports an interesting slanted design and a remote which flips over to give the user a full QWERTY keyboard to interface with the Boxee software.
On the other hand, this month also sees the Xbox 360 Kinect interface to the market, again something I have been following since its original working title "Project Natal". This device using motion capture and depth perception cameras allows you to interface with your Xbox through gesture. Seeing as the Xbox also sports a good media centre, I am leaning towards purchasing this over the Boxee Box purely as I beleive gesture based interfaces will become the next big inovation in the way we humans interact with our technology. We are already seeing this on many other devices such as the iPhone, iPad, many Android phones and of course the Apple trackpad with its multi-finger gesture system.
So many toys, not enough time!
