Kinect Message Board older than one year ago

#watchthis A team of researchers at Stanford University are living the dream: they've used Kinect and a robot arm not to cure disease or solve the energy crisis, but to build something for lightsaber practice. More »

#kinect Last year, Microsoft bought a company called Canesta. Canesta, a gesture-recognition company, is the way to the future. More »

Ever since I was a young boy
I've played the silver ball
From Soho down to Brighton
I must have played them all
But I ain't seen nothing like him
In any amusement hall
That deaf, dumb and blind kid
Sure plays a mean pinball

Right about now, I imagine you're wondering what The Who's "Pinball Wizard" has to do with a downloadable title about crashing cars -- but with the Kinect functionality, it's those last two lines that really linger. Burnout Crash! in motion with Kinect is like some foreign ballet that my brain just doesn't have the faculties to understand.

It's also apt because the team at Criterion working on this had two clear influences: pinball and game shows. Richard Franke, game director, explains that Criterion took the "depth, strategy and features" of pinball and combined them with the "lights and sounds that generate excitement" from game shows. If you close your eyes and just listen to the game in progress, it sounds like you're at the local arcade, pinball machines blaring.

Step by step, day by day, the world's researchers and engineers bring us ever closer to the reality of Kinect-enabled telekinesis. Check out a video demo below of Flying Machine Arena's clever hack, which enables even more precise control of a stunt quadrocopter using simple hand gestures.

#farsighted A clinical neurologist at the University of Oxford is working on a pair of glasses that is meant to help the near blind better see shapes and people. More »

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be the man in Canabalt? We haven't because, frankly, we've sent the little guy hurtling to his death very, very often. If your own morbid curiosity can overcome this grisly truth, you may be interested in Walk the Line, a Kinect project developed by students at ENJMIN, a games and interactive media school in France.

Walk the Line tasks players with escaping a city as it falls down around them, physically dodging obstacles and leaping over chasms. You can see the action in the (all too brief) trailer above. We just hope the folks at Kinect Fun Labs - or even the good people at Microsoft Studios - are watching too.

#likesandsthroughthehourglass Project Mimicry, an indie concept piece for Kinect, is a sandbox game in the truest sense of the word: it uses a real box of sand as the game's controller. More »

#jazzhands At E3 in 2009 (and 2010), Microsoft's Kinect camera was promising, but also glitchy. At E3 2011, it looked more responsive. And there's a reason for that. More »

#mothernature I heard great things about Mother Nature last week at the Games For Change conference in New York City. I heard one of the conference's experts suggest that it might be the Kinect game he's ever played. More »

Remember the terrifying future we imagined when Microsoft explained its dream of Kinect-enabled advertising? There's no need to imagine anymore, as Microsoft's demonstration has been caught on video. The footage showcases functions like television scheduling and finding local retailers, all of which is tied to responding vocally to television commercials.

One example features a Toyota commercial which prompts users to say "Xbox near me" for directions to the nearest dealership (powered by Bing maps, of course). Our question: What happens when a PlayStation ad pops up?

Look, Amazon really wants you to buy a 4GB Xbox Kinect bundle. For the second time in a week, the site is offering the $299 console bundle with a $100 credit. The deal kicks off at 11:00am PT (2:00pm ET) and is sure to go fast, so start lining up.

Christopher Lloyd gives a tour of the Kinect Fun Labs!

Target is offering up a pretty solid deal on an Xbox 360 Kinect bundle, if you need one for the garage (you know, the one place in your house where you actually have enough room for the thing to work). For this weekend only, you can get the standard Kinect setup for $299, and the Targe will throw in a $100 gift card as a bonus.

Unfortunately, that bundle only includes 4GB of memory, so you might have to pay out for an upgrade if you want to download a lot of XBLA titles. But perhaps that extra Benjamin you'll have picked up can help with that.

Thanks to Kinect, the Xbox 360 is enjoying an extended lifespan (we're required by law to joke here that it's the second or third lifespan for many of your non-slim Xboxes). Microsoft's VP of Interactive Entertainment Business for EMEA, Chris Lewis, told MCV, "We see it as about halfway through." He added, "Kinect put a huge shot of adrenaline into the business," likely not referring to last year's infusion of unsold copies of Adrenalin Misfits.

Lewis said that Microsoft deliberately targeted families and younger players with its initial Kinect offerings, and now it's moving more into "core" games. "What you will see is us using Kinect to enhance the experience and not detract from it," Lewis said. "I don't think our core gamers will tolerate anything else from us."

Activision has a announced that the next entry in the Cabela's hunting game series will feature Kinect support. The news comes from ActivisionHunts, the voice of Activision's hunting games on Twitter, which says the game will be out this year. No further details were revealed, leaving us all to speculate on just how Kinect will be integrated into the franchise. Our favorite theory: virtually grabbing a buck by the horns.

#watchthis This video gives us a unique opportunity to see behind the wall that one would hope separates entertainment from advertising. More »

Microsoft has officially revealed Nuads, a new advertising platform for the 360 dashboard which allows advertisers to add Kinect functionality to their ads. Here's how Microsoft's Mark Kroese presented it, related in horrifying detail by Edge:
His demonstration contained five suggestions for how advertisers can make use of the technology: social advocacy, in which an advert can be shared by the user simply saying "Xbox tweet"; request for information, where saying "Xbox more" will result in further details or discount codes being emailed to the user; near me, which will send a text message with directions to a nearest retailer when prompted with "Xbox near"; calendar reminders in response to "Xbox schedule"; and gesture-controlled voting. Kroese notes, however, that "the possibilities for advertisers are almost endless." Alright! Cool tech, guys! But hey, we just want to be super clear about this: The first time the 360 listens to us order dinner and surreptitiously decides we want to tweet about the new "fresher, bolder flavor of Papa John's classic pizza sauce," we're going to smash the Kinect into little pieces and feed it to a goat. Just a heads up, you know, between friends.

When The Boy Who Lived makes his big return to Hogwarts for the finale of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, he'll be doing it without the aid of motion peripherals on the Xbox 360. EA producer Gary Napper confirmed to Joystiq that Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 won't have any Kinect functionality (unlike its predecessor), as the development team at EA Bright Light made a decision "early on to focus on the core of the experience, get as close to the atmosphere of the movie and make the flow of the combat feel right."

The first Deathly Hallows game arrived last November to negative reviews. The sequel will touch down on July 12, just three days before the final movie launches in US theaters. Unfortunately, its short development time (approximately eight months) raises questions about how much the game can really improve beyond Potter's previous outing.

According to Napper, "We didn't want to dilute any of our efforts on other things that would require a lot of the team's time to perfect." We were told that EA Bright Light currently has two unannounced projects in development.

Once again, Amazon is offering an all-video game Gold Box, which is a kind of treasure chest that makes you progressively poorer as you rifle through it. The Deal of the Day starts the offers off on a good note: a $100 credit with purchase of the 4GB Xbox 360 Kinect bundle.

The first timed deal is the Wii's Exerbeat. You can find hints for the rest of the offers, including Harry Potter games, Hasbro Family Game Night, and more, after the break.

[Thanks, Cameron.]

Wired has a fascinating (if a little long) read up about how Microsoft's Kinect hardware is changing the robotics industry. For a long time, robotics has been held back, not by technology that defines how robots move, but by a lack of understanding of their environments -- a robot that can't "see" or recognize its surroundings won't have any idea where to go. Most solutions to this problem were too expensive or unwieldy to use in a lot of robotics applications.

But the Kinect has made that much easier, providing what's basically a sub-$500 kit that can recognize humans, their movements and almost any other objects around the room. And while Kinect hacks first began as a push by unofficial open source engineers, Microsoft has more or less made that kind of stuff official, both by providing developer kits for programmers and by supporting community mods.

So let it be known: Just a few years from now, when Skynet is chasing you down after capturing your loved ones to work in the slave camps, it'll be thanks to Kinect that those robots can see and hunt you while moving across the post-apocalyptic wasteland.

When Microsoft registered KinectHalo.com, we all imagined an intense cardio jumping routine punctuated by occasional cries of "Plasma sword ON!" While we hope that prototype still exists somewhere in Redmond, it seems like Kinect functionality in Halo won't be as intrusive as we imagined. Microsoft Studios boss Phil Spencer told GameSpot, "As a first party we believe that Kinect will be important to all genres of games [...] even games like Halo Anniversary has [sic] Kinect integration."

Of course, this is the same Halo Anniversary that we first broke news of way back in February, and previewed at E3 this month. Notably, Kinect functionality was never mentioned (or showed) leaving us to speculate on what kind of integration the update has. With games like Forza Motorsport 4, Ghost Recon Future Soldier, and Mass Effect 3 going for a "Better with Kinect" strategy, that's as likely a scenario as any. And it's also the kind of non-intrusive, level-headed implementation we were worried they'd settle for.

[Image credit: 'LaughPong']

Microsoft Game Studios VP Phil Spencer has told GameSpot "We believe that Kinect will be important to all genres of games. Be it racing games with Forza, combat games like Ryse...even games like Halo Anniversary have Kinect integration." Here's hoping it's just to browse the menus. [GameSpot, via Edge] More »

#watchthis It's not that he's cute that makes me mad. It's that he's cute and better than me. More »

#culturesmash At the Tokyo Game Show, booth companions wear skimpy outfits. Some say it's degrading, some like it. Microsoft's booth companion outfits are cute and designed to show off each woman's best feature, giving them more confidence and making them comfortable. More »

It turns out that yesterday's report was true, as today Microsoft released the beta version of its Kinect for Windows software development kit. While certainly not the first development software released for Kinect, the beta SDK does mark the first kit officially offered by Microsoft. The kit is available in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavors, requires Windows 7 and is for non-commercial use only.

The Kinect for Windows SDK can be downloaded directly from Microsoft here. Now get to work on those Kinect hacks ... er, applications.

The Kinect for Windows SDK beta is up, and a bright shiny future of PC motion tracking begins! I’m looking forward to “Slumped In A Chair, Twitching A Bit” and other exciting motion-tracking games you can play at your PC. Hopefully there will be a version of that Milo thing where you can make friends with a Space Marine.

Relatedly, I’ve posted a video of Kinect running in Unity below, because I really like the visuals. (That’s what I used to illustrate this post.)(more…)

Spring may have already sprung, but Microsoft appears ready to finally deliver its promised Kinect for Windows SDK to coincide with a live web event tomorrow, Thursday June 15. According to a report by WinRumors, the release is being timed along with a special Microsoft "Channel 9" streaming presentation on the Microsoft Developers Network site.

Microsoft Spain president María Garaña reportedly slipped the news during her presentation at the Red Innova conference in Madrid today. The MSDN site is currently hosting a countdown to tomorrow's announcement, which is when we'll presumably learn the full details of the beta.

Even though nothing's come of that Kinect-compatible Gears of War rumor, it doesn't mean Bleszinski isn't open to devloping with Microsoft's peripheral in mind. He told IndustryGamers that while he'd like to give it a go, it's really an issue of time and money. Isn't that always the case?

"If I had unlimited amounts of time and a team I could sit down and make a cool Kinect game, and I would love to, but it's a matter of time and opportunity costs right now," he said. While we knew long ago there wouldn't be any Kinect functionality in Gears of War 3, we fully expect something down the line. As one of Microsoft's most successful franchises on Xbox, we wouldn't count the series out after the release of its third game this September. But as of right now, there isn't any indication to suggest that a Kinect-compatible Gears is more than just a brilliant idea bouncing around the internet's collective noggin.

It's hard to imagine Microsoft having even more Kinect games in the wings than were shown at its Kinect-centric E3 presentation, but there's at least one that didn't make it on stage: Hole in the Wall. The adaptation of the TV game show (about trying to fit through hilariously shaped cutouts in walls moving toward you) showed up in ratings last month, and has only now been announced by publisher Ludia. It'll be out on XBLA this summer, with single and online multiplayer, and " hilarious bonus videos from the TV show."

But there's an unexpected twist! According to the press release, the deal with TV show producer Fremantle Media is for Hole in the Wall games, plural, and the release specifies that the first Hole in the Wall game is due this summer.

It's a series.

"My name's Peter Molyneux and I made this horrendous mistake." With that emblematic phrase, Lionhead creative director Peter Molyneux kicks off a hilarious public service announcement he created with the help of OXM UK. According to him, the Fable: The Journey demo he showed off at E3 2011 gave the impression that the game is "on rails," an idea he's quick to dispel.

Apparently, the team at Lionhead working on the Kinect-based Fable title decided to remove navigation controls from the press demo, the same snippet shown during Microsoft's presser, effectively putting the game on rails and giving everyone the wrong impression. "I will just say on record now that Fable: The Journey is definitely not on rails," he specifies, even going so far as to ask for journalists' signatures before they exit the demo room. If you look really hard, you can spot one of our own among them. It's like Where's Waldo with squiggly pen marks!