New system which works with Xbox 360 console detects gestures and body movements via an infrared emitter
A computer system that promises to revolutionise the video games industry by allowing players to compete without hand controllers as well as without wires is launched this week.
Microsoft's Kinect, which works with its Xbox 360 console, detects gestures and body movements via an infrared emitter and a camera that picks up the infrared light reflected from 48 points on a player's body, almost in real-time.
"It's an amazing technology," said David Braben, founder of British games studio, Frontier Developments. "If you were to describe this to someone just a couple of years ago, it would have sounded science fiction. There are things that it does that just feel magical."
In 2006 Nintendo's Wii allowed control of a game without using wires to connect its handset. Microsoft's Kinect goes a step further, allowing gamers to interact with the onscreen action through their body movement rather than by holding a controller or pressing a button.
The technology also lets gamers navigate the Xbox 360 menu and control the console by means of speech. The camera can even recognise different players.
Braben, who co-wrote the Elite space trading game, believes the Kinect system has huge potential, and his company has created a pet game, Kinectimals, as one of its launch titles.
"The first thing that grabbed me was how we could create a window into another world; and when you move your head, the world moves too, it breaks down the barrier of the television screen," he said.
Kinect is seen in the industry as Microsoft's most serious push to date for supremacy in the vast mainstream gaming market that the Wii has dominated. While shoot-'em-ups such as Halo and Gears of War, and the Xbox Live online gaming service, have made the Xbox 360 popular, Microsoft has struggled to appeal to the mainstream market dominated by the Wii with its simple party games and fun "WiiMote" control.
According to analysts, the consumer appeal of Kinect will be in its software. Very few of the 19 launch titles move beyond the fitness, dancing and party concepts familiar from the Wii, and its continued success will depend on developers exploring and finding as-yet unconceived of possibilities in the hardware.
Kinect's infrared traces 20 joint movements and 48 parts of the player's body almost in real time, creating a three-dimensional map accurate to 1cm in depth and 3mm in height and width ? which means it "knows" where gamers are.
If Kinect is a success, it may be a double victory for Microsoft, because it will mean the Xbox 360 will not need to be replaced until 2015, when Kinect has matured.
At �129.99 Kinect costs almost as much as a Wii, but pre-orders and retail interest have apparently been so encouraging that Microsoft upped its sales expectations for this quarter to 5m units.
Andrew Oliver, chief technology officer of Blitz Games Studios, said: "Kinect has the ability to put the player right into the action. Players will be 'seen' and 'heard' by the characters in their games, and interact with them without needing to have an understanding of existing rules and 'conventions' of play. It's all about broadening the market - and even broadening our definition of the word 'game'." Addressing the question of latency, or response time, Oliver said: "It obviously takes a fraction longer to process interpreted camera data than it does to process a button-press.
"That said, we're talking about incredibly small differences, probably one or two frames, perhaps a 30th of a second."
For purchasers, meanwhile, there may be a more practical consideration. "The big issue I think, will be space," says Craig Owens of Edge magazine. "They recommend you have six to eight feet in front of the TV.
"Well, Microsoft would seem to have bigger living rooms than a lot of us."
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/nov/08/kinect-system-launched-microsoft
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