Microsoft's Kinect is connecting at the cash register. The company today said that it sold 1 million of the $150 controllers for the Xbox in its first 10 days on the market.
This follows news from England that the arrival of Kinect and "Call of Duty: Black Ops" last week combined to give game sellers in the United Kingdom their highest grossing week of all time.
With Black Friday and the real holiday selling season still to come, Microsoft is now suggesting it may beat its goal. Earlier this month it upped the forecast from 3 million to 5 million by year's end. Now it's talking about selling more than 5 million.
In today's announcement, Don Mattrick, president of the Interactive Entertainment Business, said the company is going to "keep pace with high demand and deliver against our plan to sell more than 5 million Kinect sensors worldwide by the end of this year."
Kinect went on sale in the U.S. on Nov. 4 and in Europe Nov. 10. It launches in Asia next week. Microsoft expects the system to be available through 60,000 retailers in 38 countries by the holidays. (Here's my Kinect review.)
View the original article here
Monday, November 15, 2010
Review: Microsoft Xbox 360 Kinect
Four years after Nintendo changed video game consoles with its Wii system and only two months after Sony launched its own answer to motion gaming controls, the PlayStation Move, Microsoft is today launching a pricey device called “Kinect.” Combining a motion-sensing camera and microphone array, Kinect seeks to eliminate the need for plastic game controllers entirely on the Xbox 360 console, at least in games and applications that use Kinect. It arrives on a wave of hundreds of millions of marketing dollars and cynical expectations from gamers, including this one. You should have heard me deride the thing when Microsoft unveiled Kinect (previously known as “Project Natal”) back in June.
Remarkably, Microsoft has delivered. Kinect retains much of the simplicity and charm that made the Wii a hit while putting its own mark on the vogue for motion controls with a very accurate device that maps your body and responds to the movement of players and to voice commands as well. Using an infrared light and camera sensor, Kinect creates a 3-D image of your play area and any people in the camera’s frame. From this image it can recognize body shapes, the movement of limbs and yes, even an individual’s face, making it capable of quickly matching the visual of a player to a Kinect or Xbox Live profile.
For the last week, I’ve been testing out a Kinect unit provided by Microsoft with my own Xbox 360 along with “Kinect Adventures,” which comes bundled with Kinect, and five other launch games like “Dance Central” and “Kinect Sports.”
Overall, the experience was much more fun and problem-free than I had imagined.
Setup: Setup was straightforward — if you have a newer, slim Xbox 360, it only requires a single cable plugged into a special port on new consoles. With older Xbox 360s like mine, it requires plugging in a USB cable to the back of the system and plugging a power cable from the Kinect sensor into an AC outlet. Once Kinect was, eh, “Kinected” and perched, centered, on a shelf just above my HDTV, I never had to rearrange the sensor. It contains a motor for automatically adjusting itself and every now and then while playing, I’d see the camera silently tilt or pivot to get an optimal view.
It does require quite a bit of space to get the most out of games. A medium-sized living room is fine, but anyone with an Xbox 360 in a room with lots of tough-to-move furniture and no open space might want to give Kinect a pass.
I tried Kinect during the day and at night and no matter what the lighting conditions, the Kinect sensor could still find me and see my movements, though photos taken in games got darker and fuzzier with less light in the room. Dim lighting didn’t appear to affect actual gameplay, though. The Kinect Hub suggests running the configuration software, “Kinect Tuner,” multiple times in different lighting conditions to train Kinect. It’s not required, but a good idea if you plan to play in a room with less-than-optimal lighting
.
The Dashboard: The first change you’ll see when Kinect is installed is a new “Kinect Hub” where you can control menus, select Zune media player, a new ESPN streaming video service (free for Xbox Live Gold members) and calibration tools for Kinect.
By waving to the sensor, you activate motion controls. Holding up either arm, you can hover a hand pointer over icons. Hovering over an icon activates a circle; if you hold it for about two seconds, you select the option. You can also grab an arrow from either edge of the screen and drag it sideways in the air to scroll through menus.
Sometimes this works great; it’s fun to control parts of the Xbox 360 Dashboard without picking up a traditional controller. And Microsoft has added voice commands to the equation. By saying clearly, “XBox,” you bring up a short list of commands of applications you can open or other activities. It works pretty well as long as there’s not a lot of background noise and you speak clearly.
These commands also work in the Zune player, Microsoft’s version of the iTunes Store. You can view previews of albums, TV shows, movies and web shows and, visually, it’s striking. But using the hand-in-the-air motion controls can be cumbersome, especially if you’re searching for something specific and try to “Type” by selecting letters one at a time. A controller is much more efficient, but props to the Kinect team for making a striking, novel new interface that’s at least worth a try.
Unfortunately, the motion controls don’t work in the regular Xbox Dashboard to control apps like Netflix or Facebook. But you can revert to the Kinect Hub at anytime by waving your arm to activate Kinect.
There’s also an interesting Kinect Video chat service that allows you to do video chat with the sensor with other Xbox Live members and Windows Live Messenger members. It’s got a few neat features; if more than one person is on camera, it shows a wide view of the room. If someone leaves, it can automatically zoom in on the person who’s left. Nicely implemented, but i would be even nicer if it was compatible with AOL Instant Messenger, Skype and Apple’s FaceTime (we can dream, can’t we?).
The Games: But the bread and butter of Kinect will be whether the games available for it are strong enough to justify a $150 investment. Gamers have been conditioned to believe that most add-on peripherals tend to collect dust in the closet after a month or two of use. Microsoft will need a steady stream of great games that make entertaining use of Kinect’s technology.
So far, there’s a strong case that Microsoft may succeed based on the initial salvo of games. The pack-in title, “Kinect Adventures” feels a lot like a Wii game, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Multiple players can engage in challenges like a slalom rafting game (“River Rush”) and another game that combines dodgeball with bowling (“Rally Ball”).
The mini-games in “Kinect Adventures” emphasize moving your whole body and bringing in friends. One great thing about Kinect is that while you can create a profile, link it to your Xbox Live account and have the sensor recognize you by your face, friends who haven’t gone through that process can still jump into a game session at almost any time and play. Typically, Kinect assigns them a random avatar and they can join in seconds. It’s a great approach, one that eliminates the process of signing in typical in a lot of multiplayer games. And the games themselves are very easy to learn and start playing, such as “Space Pop,” where you flap your arms to fly in a low-gravity room and pop bubbles as they appear.
“Adventures” is not spectacular, but it serves its purpose as a good tech demo for Kinect, incorporating full-body play, the Kinect microphone (you can assign movement and speech to avatars, called “Moving Statues” that you win along the way) and the camera functions. “Adventures” snaps photos of you while you play and seeing yourself jump, twist and crouch adds an extra layer of immersion (and humiliation) to the game. You can share those photos with others online or disable that option entirely.
“Kinectimals” is Kinect’s answer to PlayStation Move’s fantastic “EyePet,” but with less augmented reality and more cuddly tigers, pumas and other wild creatures. It’s geared to kids as a kind of virtual pet game and while the game looks fantastic and the ability to interact with the animals in the game is well-done, my 3-year-old didn’t find it particularly enthralling after about an hour of play and we put it aside for other launch games before too long.
“Joy Ride” is a racing game that combines elements of “Mario Kart,” but looks more like the old-school “OutRun.” You hold up arms up and steer the car by moving your both, twisting the invisible steering wheel and making other motions. It works well for what it is, but as a racing game the controls never feel as precise as you want them to feel and the whole game feels too slight for a full $50 retail title. This would have been better served as a component of “Kinect Adventures” or as a bargain-priced Xbox Live download.
“Kinect Sports” is a surprisingly strong game reminiscent of “Wii Sports” but with nicely fleshed out versions of “Boxing,” “Track and Field,” my favorite, “Soccer,” and others. Unlike the Wii’s controller, Kinect can see your feel and being able to kick a soccer ball in different directions and deflect passes with your whole body shows the kinds of things Kinect can do that the Wii and PlayStation Move can’t.
“Track and Field,” for instance, has events like “Long Jump” and “Javelin” that carefully track when your feel leave the ground or how your body twists before you throw a virtual object.
“Kinect Sports” is geared for party play and, along with “Dance Central,” is probably the second must-own of the launch bunch for Kinect buyers. While “Bowling” and “Table Tennis” don’t feel quite as full-featured as versions of these games in other titles for the Wii, “Kinect Sports” overall feels fleshed-out with lots of nice touches, like a mini-game where you can control the applause of a stadium crowd (and get them to do the wave) by moving your arms.
These aren’t hard-core sports simulations, but they’re polished, casual fun.
“Your Shape: Fitness Evolved” has a lot in common with “Wii Fit,” but doesn’t require a Balance Board and actually shows a (fuzzy, colorful) version of you on screen instead of a cartoon avatar. Depending on your self-image, seeing this representation of your body could either be an incentive for more exercise or a serious detriment to your mental health.
The game contains the kind of fitness mini-games, yoga and strength training you’d expect from an exercise video game, but it lacks some of the personality of “Wii Fit” and its many imitators and the game’s design is a little too modern; it feels like “Wii Fit” if Stanley Kubrick had directed it.
Nevertheless, it does a good job tracking your movement and keeping track of calories burned. (But, unlike “Wii Fit” it can’t tell you your weight. You’ll have to input that yourself.)
But by far the best Kinect experience I had was with “Dance Central,” a game from Harmonix, the same studio behind the excellent “Rock Band” series. With a very strong track list that includes Lady Gaga, Rihanna and M.I.A., it’s a dance game that patiently teaches you the moves, allows you to rehearse and then invites you to put on a full dance performance, which it then rates. (You can also see video of yourself afterward, an option built for hilarity.)
Like “Rock Band,” “Dance Central” blurs the line between play and performance and does it with style and panache. The game looks great, the menu options are easy to navigate and understand, and engaging in dance battles with friends is an awful lot of fun.
My daughter and wife were both able to enjoy the game and it was the first Kinect title that brought a smile to my wife’s face. She marveled at how nice it was to play a video game without worry about controllers and pushing buttons. Then she danced to “Funky Town” as we watched.
If there’s a killer app for Kinect, it’s probably “Dance Central,” while would appear to be the ideal holiday party game now that the fake guitars/instruments genre seems to be breathing its last gasps.
Conclusions: Skeptic that I was about the resurgence of motion controls this holiday season, my opinion of what Kinect is and might be changed drastically after a week of play. The technology is clearly well-implemented here and, unlike all the fiddling and readjusting I had to do while using the PlayStation Move recently, Kinect was a much more streamlined, user-friendly experience.
I’ve heard some users have had problems using the sensor in rooms with direct sunlight and those who don’t have a lot of room to move around might be frustrated by the inability to bring friends into their games.
But Kinect does what it set out to do — it brings a fresh, new take on what the Wii introduced four years ago with motion sensing that works surprisingly well.
In these strapped economic times, $150 might be a hard pill to swallow for casual gamers, especially when you can get a new Wii with two games and two Wii Plus motion controllers for $199. But Kinect seems comparably priced to PlayStation Move when you consider that Sony’s $99 bundle only comes with one controller.
Kinect also comes in console bundles for those who don’t own an Xbox 360 or want to upgrade to the new slimmer, quieter models. A $299 bundle includes Kinect and a 4-gigabyte Xbox model while a $399 bundle includes a 250-gigabyte hard drive model of the Xbox 360. Both come with “Kinect Adventures” and demos of some of the other launch games.
So far, Kinect has a few strong games, some great features that enhance the Xbox 360 experience and a lot of potential. If Microsoft can ensure that a steady stream of great games are in the pipeline, it could become the best option for motion-controlled games of the current console generation. They’re not lacking for confidence; Microsoft is estimating it will sell 5 million Kinect units before the year is out.
Of course, we’ll just have to wait and see what Nintendo does next as a follow-up to the Wii.
Omar L. Gallaga writes about technology culture for the Austin American-Statesman. He's worked for the American-Statesman since 1997 and edited Technopolis, the newspaper's personal tech section, and ¡ahora sí!, Austin's Spanish-language newspaper. He's currently a contributor to NPR's "All Tech Considered" segment, which airs Mondays on "All Things Considered." He's been a writer and performer with Austin's award-winning Latino Comedy Project, and is a contributing writer for Television Without Pity. He writes a comic strip, "Space Monkeys!" with his brother, Pablo, and lives in New Braunfels with his wife and three technologically savvy cats.
View the original article here
Remarkably, Microsoft has delivered. Kinect retains much of the simplicity and charm that made the Wii a hit while putting its own mark on the vogue for motion controls with a very accurate device that maps your body and responds to the movement of players and to voice commands as well. Using an infrared light and camera sensor, Kinect creates a 3-D image of your play area and any people in the camera’s frame. From this image it can recognize body shapes, the movement of limbs and yes, even an individual’s face, making it capable of quickly matching the visual of a player to a Kinect or Xbox Live profile.
For the last week, I’ve been testing out a Kinect unit provided by Microsoft with my own Xbox 360 along with “Kinect Adventures,” which comes bundled with Kinect, and five other launch games like “Dance Central” and “Kinect Sports.”
Overall, the experience was much more fun and problem-free than I had imagined.
Setup: Setup was straightforward — if you have a newer, slim Xbox 360, it only requires a single cable plugged into a special port on new consoles. With older Xbox 360s like mine, it requires plugging in a USB cable to the back of the system and plugging a power cable from the Kinect sensor into an AC outlet. Once Kinect was, eh, “Kinected” and perched, centered, on a shelf just above my HDTV, I never had to rearrange the sensor. It contains a motor for automatically adjusting itself and every now and then while playing, I’d see the camera silently tilt or pivot to get an optimal view.
It does require quite a bit of space to get the most out of games. A medium-sized living room is fine, but anyone with an Xbox 360 in a room with lots of tough-to-move furniture and no open space might want to give Kinect a pass.
I tried Kinect during the day and at night and no matter what the lighting conditions, the Kinect sensor could still find me and see my movements, though photos taken in games got darker and fuzzier with less light in the room. Dim lighting didn’t appear to affect actual gameplay, though. The Kinect Hub suggests running the configuration software, “Kinect Tuner,” multiple times in different lighting conditions to train Kinect. It’s not required, but a good idea if you plan to play in a room with less-than-optimal lighting
.
The Dashboard: The first change you’ll see when Kinect is installed is a new “Kinect Hub” where you can control menus, select Zune media player, a new ESPN streaming video service (free for Xbox Live Gold members) and calibration tools for Kinect.
By waving to the sensor, you activate motion controls. Holding up either arm, you can hover a hand pointer over icons. Hovering over an icon activates a circle; if you hold it for about two seconds, you select the option. You can also grab an arrow from either edge of the screen and drag it sideways in the air to scroll through menus.
Sometimes this works great; it’s fun to control parts of the Xbox 360 Dashboard without picking up a traditional controller. And Microsoft has added voice commands to the equation. By saying clearly, “XBox,” you bring up a short list of commands of applications you can open or other activities. It works pretty well as long as there’s not a lot of background noise and you speak clearly.
These commands also work in the Zune player, Microsoft’s version of the iTunes Store. You can view previews of albums, TV shows, movies and web shows and, visually, it’s striking. But using the hand-in-the-air motion controls can be cumbersome, especially if you’re searching for something specific and try to “Type” by selecting letters one at a time. A controller is much more efficient, but props to the Kinect team for making a striking, novel new interface that’s at least worth a try.
Unfortunately, the motion controls don’t work in the regular Xbox Dashboard to control apps like Netflix or Facebook. But you can revert to the Kinect Hub at anytime by waving your arm to activate Kinect.
There’s also an interesting Kinect Video chat service that allows you to do video chat with the sensor with other Xbox Live members and Windows Live Messenger members. It’s got a few neat features; if more than one person is on camera, it shows a wide view of the room. If someone leaves, it can automatically zoom in on the person who’s left. Nicely implemented, but i would be even nicer if it was compatible with AOL Instant Messenger, Skype and Apple’s FaceTime (we can dream, can’t we?).
The Games: But the bread and butter of Kinect will be whether the games available for it are strong enough to justify a $150 investment. Gamers have been conditioned to believe that most add-on peripherals tend to collect dust in the closet after a month or two of use. Microsoft will need a steady stream of great games that make entertaining use of Kinect’s technology.
So far, there’s a strong case that Microsoft may succeed based on the initial salvo of games. The pack-in title, “Kinect Adventures” feels a lot like a Wii game, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Multiple players can engage in challenges like a slalom rafting game (“River Rush”) and another game that combines dodgeball with bowling (“Rally Ball”).
The mini-games in “Kinect Adventures” emphasize moving your whole body and bringing in friends. One great thing about Kinect is that while you can create a profile, link it to your Xbox Live account and have the sensor recognize you by your face, friends who haven’t gone through that process can still jump into a game session at almost any time and play. Typically, Kinect assigns them a random avatar and they can join in seconds. It’s a great approach, one that eliminates the process of signing in typical in a lot of multiplayer games. And the games themselves are very easy to learn and start playing, such as “Space Pop,” where you flap your arms to fly in a low-gravity room and pop bubbles as they appear.
“Adventures” is not spectacular, but it serves its purpose as a good tech demo for Kinect, incorporating full-body play, the Kinect microphone (you can assign movement and speech to avatars, called “Moving Statues” that you win along the way) and the camera functions. “Adventures” snaps photos of you while you play and seeing yourself jump, twist and crouch adds an extra layer of immersion (and humiliation) to the game. You can share those photos with others online or disable that option entirely.
“Kinectimals” is Kinect’s answer to PlayStation Move’s fantastic “EyePet,” but with less augmented reality and more cuddly tigers, pumas and other wild creatures. It’s geared to kids as a kind of virtual pet game and while the game looks fantastic and the ability to interact with the animals in the game is well-done, my 3-year-old didn’t find it particularly enthralling after about an hour of play and we put it aside for other launch games before too long.
“Joy Ride” is a racing game that combines elements of “Mario Kart,” but looks more like the old-school “OutRun.” You hold up arms up and steer the car by moving your both, twisting the invisible steering wheel and making other motions. It works well for what it is, but as a racing game the controls never feel as precise as you want them to feel and the whole game feels too slight for a full $50 retail title. This would have been better served as a component of “Kinect Adventures” or as a bargain-priced Xbox Live download.
“Kinect Sports” is a surprisingly strong game reminiscent of “Wii Sports” but with nicely fleshed out versions of “Boxing,” “Track and Field,” my favorite, “Soccer,” and others. Unlike the Wii’s controller, Kinect can see your feel and being able to kick a soccer ball in different directions and deflect passes with your whole body shows the kinds of things Kinect can do that the Wii and PlayStation Move can’t.
“Track and Field,” for instance, has events like “Long Jump” and “Javelin” that carefully track when your feel leave the ground or how your body twists before you throw a virtual object.
“Kinect Sports” is geared for party play and, along with “Dance Central,” is probably the second must-own of the launch bunch for Kinect buyers. While “Bowling” and “Table Tennis” don’t feel quite as full-featured as versions of these games in other titles for the Wii, “Kinect Sports” overall feels fleshed-out with lots of nice touches, like a mini-game where you can control the applause of a stadium crowd (and get them to do the wave) by moving your arms.
These aren’t hard-core sports simulations, but they’re polished, casual fun.
“Your Shape: Fitness Evolved” has a lot in common with “Wii Fit,” but doesn’t require a Balance Board and actually shows a (fuzzy, colorful) version of you on screen instead of a cartoon avatar. Depending on your self-image, seeing this representation of your body could either be an incentive for more exercise or a serious detriment to your mental health.
The game contains the kind of fitness mini-games, yoga and strength training you’d expect from an exercise video game, but it lacks some of the personality of “Wii Fit” and its many imitators and the game’s design is a little too modern; it feels like “Wii Fit” if Stanley Kubrick had directed it.
Nevertheless, it does a good job tracking your movement and keeping track of calories burned. (But, unlike “Wii Fit” it can’t tell you your weight. You’ll have to input that yourself.)
But by far the best Kinect experience I had was with “Dance Central,” a game from Harmonix, the same studio behind the excellent “Rock Band” series. With a very strong track list that includes Lady Gaga, Rihanna and M.I.A., it’s a dance game that patiently teaches you the moves, allows you to rehearse and then invites you to put on a full dance performance, which it then rates. (You can also see video of yourself afterward, an option built for hilarity.)
Like “Rock Band,” “Dance Central” blurs the line between play and performance and does it with style and panache. The game looks great, the menu options are easy to navigate and understand, and engaging in dance battles with friends is an awful lot of fun.
My daughter and wife were both able to enjoy the game and it was the first Kinect title that brought a smile to my wife’s face. She marveled at how nice it was to play a video game without worry about controllers and pushing buttons. Then she danced to “Funky Town” as we watched.
If there’s a killer app for Kinect, it’s probably “Dance Central,” while would appear to be the ideal holiday party game now that the fake guitars/instruments genre seems to be breathing its last gasps.
Conclusions: Skeptic that I was about the resurgence of motion controls this holiday season, my opinion of what Kinect is and might be changed drastically after a week of play. The technology is clearly well-implemented here and, unlike all the fiddling and readjusting I had to do while using the PlayStation Move recently, Kinect was a much more streamlined, user-friendly experience.
I’ve heard some users have had problems using the sensor in rooms with direct sunlight and those who don’t have a lot of room to move around might be frustrated by the inability to bring friends into their games.
But Kinect does what it set out to do — it brings a fresh, new take on what the Wii introduced four years ago with motion sensing that works surprisingly well.
In these strapped economic times, $150 might be a hard pill to swallow for casual gamers, especially when you can get a new Wii with two games and two Wii Plus motion controllers for $199. But Kinect seems comparably priced to PlayStation Move when you consider that Sony’s $99 bundle only comes with one controller.
Kinect also comes in console bundles for those who don’t own an Xbox 360 or want to upgrade to the new slimmer, quieter models. A $299 bundle includes Kinect and a 4-gigabyte Xbox model while a $399 bundle includes a 250-gigabyte hard drive model of the Xbox 360. Both come with “Kinect Adventures” and demos of some of the other launch games.
So far, Kinect has a few strong games, some great features that enhance the Xbox 360 experience and a lot of potential. If Microsoft can ensure that a steady stream of great games are in the pipeline, it could become the best option for motion-controlled games of the current console generation. They’re not lacking for confidence; Microsoft is estimating it will sell 5 million Kinect units before the year is out.
Of course, we’ll just have to wait and see what Nintendo does next as a follow-up to the Wii.
Omar L. Gallaga writes about technology culture for the Austin American-Statesman. He's worked for the American-Statesman since 1997 and edited Technopolis, the newspaper's personal tech section, and ¡ahora sí!, Austin's Spanish-language newspaper. He's currently a contributor to NPR's "All Tech Considered" segment, which airs Mondays on "All Things Considered." He's been a writer and performer with Austin's award-winning Latino Comedy Project, and is a contributing writer for Television Without Pity. He writes a comic strip, "Space Monkeys!" with his brother, Pablo, and lives in New Braunfels with his wife and three technologically savvy cats.
View the original article here
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