Everything about Kinect.

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Everything about Kinect.

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(Administrator) 2010-11-08, 11:36 #1

Member since May 2011 · 2203 posts · Location: Brisbane
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Subject: Everything about Kinect.

Kinect is out, and there's a lot of people talking about it. I don't have one and I don't really think I can name anything I'm less likely to buy in the foreseeable future. Gaming is about control, and the Kinect doesn't seem designed to enhance that.

First, this seems sort of important. According to Brandon Sheffield (Game Developer, insert credit), Japan and Kinect aren't compatible. This probably won't help sales in Asia:

Quote by Brandon:
Just to confirm what pretty much everyone already knows, Kinect is basically not possible to use well in apartments. Large homes only.

Did you know that one of the guys working no the Kinect also worked on Atari hardware and software? Now you do. (Great Atari ST history here and here)

It seems like a duh moment to me, but Kinect uses infrared illumination so it can see things in your living room. Ars is shocked to find that this means your living room is lit up by this infrared light. Seriously, Ars? This is newsworthy? What's next, the Kinect microphone can hear you talk? Golly.

Speaking of the microphone, Penny Arcade's Tycho likes the voice control.

Quote by Tycho:
It was probably worth the price to see Brenna's face grow increasingly more horrified as I grabbed an episode of a show without a remote, paused it with my voice when I left, and resumed it the same way.

Like any new release, there are apologists. GamaSutra's Chris Morris basically admits it sucks but says it doesn't matter. As if that makes a lick of sense. Hey Chris, I'm of the opinion that "it's good enough for now" is tantamount to admitting failure. Of course it is true that the slobbering masses will often make successes out of things that have no right to be.

Via Consumerist, someone already broke his flatscreen playing Kinect volleyball. Also via Consumerist, Kinect doesn't hate black people after all.

For you hackers out there, there's a $2000 bounty on open source Kinect drivers. And while you're hacking, here's the internals laid bare for your enjoyment, thanks to ifixit.

As for the software...

Well, by all accounts, Sonic Free Riders sucks. Rather a lot, according to Ars and every other review.

Penny Arcade's Gabe says:

Quote by Gabe:
Of all the crap I played yesterday on the Kinect only Dance Central and Kinectimals stood out as being quality titles. The controls in Sonic Free Riders just plain don’t work. With the exception of hang gliding Real Motion Sports is a mess. Kinect Sports wants me to bowl and play ping pong in my living room for the thousandth fucking time. I’m sorry but I have jumped around in front of my TV enough now. Granted I haven’t done it on my Xbox but I’ve done it on both of my other consoles and the Kinect games just doesn’t feel any different. In fact in many cases they feel worse.

BLEARGH

2010-11-08, 18:47 #2

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Now that we have something to compare the Wii too, it's interesting to see how limited the Wiimote input is. But like haiku, those limitations unintuitively cause the Wii to be more standardized. Every game that uses waggle and wave uses those functions in pretty much the same way, and so there's a generalized method and expectation. Once you know how to play one Wii game, you can figure out all the rest.

There is no such standardization in the Kinect input, from everything I've read. The Kinect device is throwing all this data at the hardware, and the software is standing there with an apron and a glove trying to catch some of it to make a useful game out of. Why didn't Microsoft constrain the data types that could be used for the first few launch titles? Every Kinect game appears to have to be played differently. The scattered and inconsistent methods doesn't bode well for the future of the product, even if the technology does improve over time. But in this case, execution will turn out to be more important than the gear.

(Administrator) 2010-11-09, 11:10 #3

Member since May 2011 · 2203 posts · Location: Brisbane
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Yeah, the lack of a unified input scheme is all the more embarrassing considering how excellent their LIVE internet gaming system works. Would it have really been a problem to sort out some standards for developers?

I see the Kinect as a solution to a problem no one had. MS, desperate to combat the Wii, bought a company that created a new input method and then went looking for a way to use it. While Sony just copied the Wii directly, MS went a different way and threw money at a solution without any real idea of what they were going to do with it. I think the lack of standards for the Kinect inputs is direct proof that they really weren't confident about it at all.

Release it, hope people like it, figure out what works, then figure it out? Not much of a business plan.

I'm a bit disgusted, actually. While I expect half-assery from Microsoft, I don't really expect it with the Xbox, a product line that has always seemed very considered and deliberate.

How does it make sense to spend so much without any kind of apparent plan? According to Ars, MS is expected to spend half a billion dollars flogging this thing. That's as much as Sony spent developing the fucking Playstation.

Really? Half a billion, plus development costs plus the cost of buying the company that invented it, and you still don't know how it should work!?

You guys suck.

BLEARGH

2010-11-09, 12:26 #4

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Following up on this confused approach from MS is a recent Wired article. It covers a lot of press-releasy stuff about the Kinect, but it all sounds so unrealistically enthusiastic. At least, from MS. So much of what MS says sounds like marketing bullshit to me.

Ben Kilgore, general manager of the Xbox platform. “Every kind of major Microsoft group in the company is evaluating Kinect. They’re trying to understand what it means for those experiences.”

If I were a cynical man I'd say they were scrambling to fill a management mandate to find a use, any use, for this expensive webcam the boss paid too much for.

Matt Barlow, marketing boss for Xbox 360 and Xbox Live. "...our customer base is all those who have rejected gaming either because of the content or the controller. If you could say doubling, tripling, quadrupling the audience -- I believe that. We’re also talking about a hypersocial audience, predominantly female, who want to interact while playing.”

This mythical female audience is a fairly popular target for all kinds of silly things. Fact is, girls already play games. The young ones, at least - this hypersocial female then must be the moms and grandmoms I guess? Hypersocial never accurately described any part of that demographic in my experience.

The Wired article has some other interesting tidbits. Specifically, some discussion of how the system works. Basically it's Dragon's* probabilistic expectation of things that follow one another. But for movement instead of words.

The paper, Probabilistic Tracking in a Metric Space, suggested that a ballet dancer’s movements could be tracked by assigning a probabilistic likelihood that each frame would lead on to any other frame. By feeding a computer raw data of a ballerina’s typical movements, each snapshot -- Blake called them “exemplars” -- could be automatically assigned its most likely next frame.

That seems like it'd require a massive number of potential or expected actions. Where are all these 'exemplars' stored? Is this lookup-and-compare action part of the reason the 360 takes a noticeable performance hit when the Kinect is used?

Ars predicts the Kinect will get some sort of button controller soon. It'll have to if it's to please the action gamers. They describe things like a bowling game where you can't control the release of the ball 'cause you haven't any fine control over your actions. The Playstation Move and Wii both allow very fine control over the angle of your swing in their respective sports games, but Kinect cannot.

The internet verdict seems to be nearly unanimous: It might be cool someday, but not yet.

* Dragon produced a voice recognition product that got past the rather serious hurdle of machines being inherently shitty at actually understanding human speech by using probability to guess what words were likely to be based on the previous words. It analyzed the way people spoke and used a vast library to make assumptions about what you were likely to have said. It was brilliant and became the first usable voice recognition product.

Just like NFG, but x 9!

2010-11-14, 22:45 #5

Member since Sep 2007 · 130 posts · Location: Canberra
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I saw a guy using the Kinect at a game store in Belfast (and deciding to play an ENTIRE round of bowling so nobody else gets a go) and it looked okay. It seemed pretty much just "move your hand near the ball, push your hand at the screen, hope it goes where you were intending". I wouldn't have minded trying it to see how well it worked, but couldn't be bothered waiting that long.

As for the 'it entices girls' bullshit, that really gets up my nose more. About 90% of the girls I know play video games of some sort, and making little fluff games "for girls" in a pink consol is just insulting to me. Also about reaching older demographics of users, well my mother can barely play MarioKart, so I don't think anything the Kinect does will really help, and can you really see grandmothers jumping around the room to make something happen? Doesn't seem likely to me.

I think they've got a big struggle to get past the novelty factor of this, let's see if they can do it!

2010-11-18, 02:54 #6

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what i love is that microsoft says kinect hasnt been hacked because a software driver doesnt count as a hack. sounds like they are just trying to save face because didnt they say it was "unhackable" or something? people need to learn that saying "it's impossible!" is just announcing a challenge.

i think the kinect is brilliant. yes, it's not ground breaking technology per se but it's how they combined the various technologies to make depth based video processing. too make the deal even sweeter, it's all done on-board so there isnt a shitload of software-side video processing that needs to be done.

a lot of the time, microsoft comes out with lame stuff but sometimes it comes out with cool shit and this is one thing that is cool, especially since it works on linux.

(Administrator) 2010-11-18, 07:45 #7

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I think that, as a launch point for future interfaces, Kinect is likely to prove important.

As an interface for games I'm not sure any interface has ever been less interesting to me.

BLEARGH

2010-11-20, 07:06 #8

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future interfaces, maybe but not for regular computer/tv/device interfaces. i think it could be for automated systems that need to interact with real life objects or people... to kill them. basically, it could be an advance in robotics but not really for the consumer... unless we start getting personal robots... that dont kill us (good luck with that one. pff!). though another thing it would be great for is quickly mapping inaccessible areas which would be fantastic for military applications and cave dwelling/mapping people.

it seems like sony and microsoft are trying to appeal to a large target audience like nintendo did but as we have seen, nintendo cant keep it up and their sales are dropping. the only non-standard controller i might have interest in is a gun type device. unfortunately, those have their own set of problems that havent been solved but i can see a camera type interface helping resolve some of those issues. oh, i forgot steering wheels! those are cool but the consumer end ones are shit and this wouldnt help at all.

in short, your hardcore gamers, the people that buy lots of games are not interested in jumping around like a retard but i guess if you have run out of real games to make, pander to those that do like jumping around like a retard.

~FIN~

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