Gaming without wires

Midnight fireworks at Toronto launch

Kinect, Microsoft’s newest game system, launched in North America yesterday. Here in Toronto, Canada, MS took over a downtown public square with a two-storey high glass box demonstration pavilion, music, fireworks at midnight, and lots of kiosks for people to try the games.

Kinect is an add-on to Microsoft’s Xbox 360 platform. The Kinect box includes a camera, motion sensors and microphone. These provide full-body 3D motion capture, facial recognition, and voice recognition.

All this means that you play games without a controller. In effect, your body is the controller. Apparently you will even be able to pick up objects and Kinect will recognize them so you can use them in the games. This is very cool!

This could easily suck sales away from Wii. While Wii opened new gaming markets by untethering players from the usual couch-bound controller, Kinect does away with controllers.

As the technology develops, I believe this will enable more natural interaction with games, Rather than having to adapt to what a game requires, you would be able to move exactly as you would when performing the real-world activity.

I predict that the technology may one day have benefits far beyond just gaming. Imagine controlling your personal computer, music system, television, banking systems, etc, with natural and intuitive motions rather than arcane commands or awkward remotes. This could convince even the hard core luddites to upgrade to newer technology. This could be interesting.

Toronto launch