I got to see some of the Kinect’s integration with the Xbox dashboard today, and it’s worth getting excited about. For starters, to get into the Kinect Dashboard interface, all you have to do is wave your
hand. When you do, the system will detect you and login your profile. From there, you can navigate your Xbox with voice or with motion commands.
For motion, simply move your (right) hand to the right side of the screen and more options will be revealed. If you move your hand over top one of the available options — be it a game or a program like Netflix or the recently announced ESPN — then the hand icon changes to show a small circle which rapidly fills up as long as you hold your hand over the icon. This is the motion way of selecting a program to run.
From within the app, for example a movie, you can issue voice commands to pause, stop, and play it. You can also use motion commands to do these as well as move a slider to the particular point in the media that you want to watch (to skip to a certain scene for example). In practice, this all worked rather well, but there were some snags with the voice commands, likely due to the noise of E3 on the other side of the demo room. The voice command function, at launch, will have the user saying things like “Xbox, pause” and so forth. We were told that potentially, in the future, users will be able to change the keyword ‘Xbox’ to something else. More and more voice commands will get added to the Kinect after it launches.
We were also shown a nice web chatting program that allows not only Kinect to Kinect users to interact in real time, but also Kinect to Windows Live users. One neat feature of this that we saw in a pre-recorded video was how the Kinect was able to detect a new person in the picture, and automatically zoom the camera appropriately to get just the right framing to fit everyone in.
Other cool features we got to see during this demo session was detail on the ESPN service. This exclusive deal that Microsoft has landed will give Xbox Gold Members the ability to watch ESPN3 content, which includes some 3500 events a year. You can also watch ESPN highlight reels from different leagues (American content only however, although there was a FIFA category and Microsoft is working on international deals). I really liked that from within the ESPN program, you can live preview an event in the ‘lobby’ before bringing it up full screen.
The ESPN program also has some neat Live tie ins. Interactive trivia questions pop up relating to the teams in the game. The percentage of wrong and right answers are shown afterwards. You are also asked who you are rooting for when you first jump in the game, and the percentage of responses is shown for this too. Another neat feature is that you can get an idea of how many people are watching the same game by looking at the population of avatars and by other visual cues that indicate the particular event is ‘hot’ or popular.
Certainly the development, and the jury, are still out on Kinect with several months to go before release, but I’m starting to like the platform more and more.
###
