Future of Kinect & Move
• ∞
Granted, I haven’t actually tried either one, but I have read a lot about them, and watched a lot of videos of them.
I wish the future was here not, but it’s not. That’s what makes it the future.
- Move is not enough.
- Kinect is not enough.
- What we need is both, plus great game design.
We need the precision & low-latency of the Move, combined with the posture & location sensing of the Kinect.
The Kinect should have near-zero latency, and should be able to track your eyes with precision.
Combined, it would be killer.
Picture this:
- The Move controllers determine your character’s direction of movement, and allow you to aim & attack precisely.
- The Kinect animates your character, and allows the environment to react to you in realistic ways.
You glance to the right, and so does your character.
You lean left, your character leans left.
You lay flat on the ground, and so does your character.
You wave your controller around like a flashlight, and so does your character.
This gets old
We have all, by now, tried gaming with our bodies (no pun intended). We’ve done the bowling & baseball. It’s great, but the novelty has worn off. What we need is some awesome (subtle) incorporation of body/motion sensing into otherwise standard games.
- I’m picturing something like Thief, or Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell, where a lot of sneaking is involved. The game should *totally* be able to see you AND hear you, in situations like that.
- Or take, for example, the game Heavy Rain. Its controller mechanics were… interesting. How much richer would it have been if you could have simply used your hands to get the milk out of the fridge? Pressing X in front of the fridge doesn’t quite have the same effect.
- What about a standard sit-on-your-couch shooter like Resident Evil, except the controller in your left hand is your flashlight, and the controller in your right hand is a pistol (or axe?).
- The game could see when you start to slouch, or get tired, and fling another zombie at you *exactly* when you’re not ready for it. Incorporate heat-vision & directed-sound-projection & recording into the Kinect, and we’re really talking. It could see your sweat & hear your pulse. Exciting.
- Kinect enables the console to know about you, which in turn, allows it to press YOUR buttons, at exactly the right time.
Kinect’s strength is not (primarily) its interaction model; it’s that it is the first simple & accurate way to get a realistic real-time representation of you inside the console.
Microsoft is in a far better position here than Sony. The Move would be easy to copy. The Kinect? Not so much.
I really do think Microsoft dropped the ball by not including Move-like controllers in the Kinect package. That would have made all the difference.
What do you think?