Tyrone Courier - Features - Xbox Kinect Set to be a Hit this Christmas

Features

Xbox Kinect Set to be a Hit this Christmas

Thursday, 9 December 2010

If there is one sure-fire gadget set to fly off the shelves of retailers this Christmas, then for gamers that item is likely to be the newly released Kinect, the fantastic new add-on for the Xbox 360 console.

The Kinect was released across Europe, to long and winding queues of excited Xbox gamers, at midnight on November 10 this year. The reason for the excitement and expectation was that the Kinect offers gamers a new experience, one that is completely different to anything they had experienced previously when playing on the console.

Using the Kinect changes how you experience and control your Xbox system: you no longer use a controller, instead you become the controller! Kinect brings games that you would usually play using an Xbox 360 controller to life by allowing you to use your body, head, arms, hands, legs, feet and even your voice to control what happens on the screen.

The Kinect is a step on from the hugely popular form of control method that was popularised first by contraptions such as the Eye-Toy on the Playstation 2 and then refined somewhat when the Nintendo Wii was released. Both of these control methods displayed the idea that moving your body would control the action on screen.

The Kinect is the next generation in that form of gaming. It offers the game total immersion into the gaming world by allowing them to use a full range of body movement or voice to influence the action on screen, without the need to hold a controller. This means that even the subtlest movement of your body can be tracked by the Kinect and converted into a corresponding movement on screen.
Furthermore, the system also allows you to control other features of your Xbox 360 by using your hand or voice. Watching movies or streamed television is now an altogether new experience as you can start, stop, forward and rewind the action on command. The Kinect is also fully compatible with Xbox Live and using the online capabilities of the system opens up a new world of opportunity for the user. The Kinect camera is capable of transmitting high quality video to any other Kinect user in the World, thus giving them the capability to make free video calls as part of their Xbox Live subscription.

The technological advancements in the Kinect are what truly make this machine astonishing and one of the must-have gadgets of Christmas 2010.

The Kinect sensor bar is attached to a small base via a motorised pivot and, when in use with an Xbox 360, is designed to be situated horizontally, directly underneath the main display. Inside the sensor bar is an RGB camera, a depth sensor and a multi-array microphone. By harnessing the power of these three items individually and combining them together via specially designed bespoke software, the Kinect is able to capture full body motion in three dimensions to a far greater degree of accuracy than has ever been available in a games console.

In addition, the camera and microphone ensure that the Kinect comes with facial and voice recognition capabilities. This is a particularly useful feature, as well as allowing for greater depth of game play and ease of use it is also a useful security tool for the user, who may wish to set up the system so that only they can use these facilities to access and control the Xbox system via the Kinect.

The multi-sensor microphone also provides the machine with acoustic source location and ambient noise suppression, which means that when a group of people are gathered in front of the Xbox to chat over the Xbox live platform, the Kinect can cope with the different sound sources and any ambient noise with little or no loss of sound quality.

However, the real crowning glory comes in the Kinect depth sensor, which uses an infrared laser combined with a CMOS sensor. This allows the Kinect to see in three dimensions under any ambient light conditions and allows the Kinect to differentiate between the human controller and other objects in view, such as living room furniture.

Those seeking to buy the Kinect have plenty of options available to them. If you already own an Xbox 360, and the Kinect is compatible with any version of the machine, then you can buy the Kinect as a stand-alone peripheral to add to your machine. However, if you do now own a console then there is a superb Xbox bundle available from major stockists, which not only includes an Xbox 360 console, either 4GB or 250GB, but also contains three Kinect-ready pieces of software as well as a brand new Kinect supplied in the bundle.

Of course, any new major piece of hardware owes a great deal of its popularity to the support it receives from the games that are released with it and after it. The Kinect has a very strong catalogue of games that will highlight the unique attributes of the console strongly to its expectant customer base. Included in the slew of games that were released alongside the Kinect in November were Dance Central, Dance Dance Evolution, Game Party in Motion, Kinect Adventures, Kinect Joy Ride, Kinectimals, Sonic Free Riders and Your Shape: Fitness Evolved.

Also released were arguably the two most important titles that can impact on the long-term success of the system: Kinect Sports and Motion Sports, which could well do for the Kinect what Wii Sports did to popularise the Wii console.

With new games already released for the console since its release and a long list of new games coming in 2011, including a Kinect Star Wars game, it is easy to see why the Kinect is the hottest new gizmo around this Christmas for gamers across the UK. The combination of great game support, innovative gameplay and incredible new technology will mean that the Kinect is a sure-fire winner for Microsoft this Christmas.