Category: Xbox 360

Rumor has it that the next iteration of Kinect for the next Microsoft Xbox will be much more accurate than its predecessor. “How accurate?” you’re probably asking yourself (or not) — accurate enough to read lips and track fingers! That’s the word according to the excellent peeps at Eurogamer. Check it out:

One development source told Eurogamer that Kinect 2 will be so powerful it will enable games to lip read, detect when players are angry, and determine in which direction they are facing. Kinect 2 can track the pitch and volume of player voices and facial characteristics to measure different emotional states.

There’s no word on how Kinect 2 will handle people that excel at masking their emotions or those with multiple-personality disorder.

Seriously though, this kind of tech seems really cool, but will it be any fun? Are you boys and girls interested in Kinect on steroids? What kind of gameplay applications do you see with a high-fidelity version of Kinect? What do you think creative souls like Hideo Kojima and Tetsuya Mizuguchi could do with a Kinect 2 that’s powerful enough to read minds lips and track fingers?

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Longtime PC Magazine columnist and receiver of crank emails from PC Magazine Labs analysts (not me…okay maybe it was me…but I had help) John Dvorak recently posted a really fascinating column about the 11 stages of Kinect for Xbox 360. I highly suggest reading it. It’s an interesting, though highly arguable, view of the gaming world through a longtime tech pundit.

According to Dvorak, Kinect is currently in phase 10. My favorite part is how he called out Microsoft’s PR people for pushing a weak and unimaginative message on what Kinect can do. Check it out:

The Kinect is now in phase ten and new uses are being ascribed, mainly 3D telecommunications. You can spot the hand of the PR folks involved by the repetitious and redundant messages seen in far too many of the stories. In this case, it’s that 3D Kinect is “now cooler than Skype.”

To see how ridiculously obvious and transparent this is, try Googling “Kinect Cooler Than Skype” and see the exact same headline and phrasing over and over and over in various publications. It’s kind of pathetic since this sort of thing should be subtle.

Dvorak’s prediction for Kinect isn’t the rosiest, but I’m not convinced it has jumped the shark (yet). Dude has predicted lots of things over the last few decades. He has been right a lot and he has been wrong a lot. He initially predicted that Kinect would fail and he was very much wrong about that. If anything, its popularity is still growing. Kinect Dance game are still popular, titles like Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster and Kinect: Disneyland Adventures are hits with the mainstream, and I believe (perhaps naively) that a creative developer will make a cool Kinect game that resonates with enthusiast gamers.

Of course that’s just my opinion. What about you America (and other countries…especially Iceland)? Do you think Kinect will languish? Or will its untapped potential be realized?

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