Thursday, June 17, 2010

Two Quick Notes

I'm getting lots of e-mail that head tracking won't actually work, because as we turn our heads, we'd lose sight of the screen. That's not exactly how I was picturing it working, and I wasn't thinking of adjustments of that magnitude, but it still points out that even things that seem potentially cool are problemmatic.

Victor Godinez of the Dallas Morning News sent me an interesting excerpt from this Gizmodo article:
"What do you think?" asks Wil Mozell, a Microsoft GM who oversees many of the companies designing Kinect's important launch titles.

"It's great," I say. "But what about the lag? Will you ever fully eliminate it?"

"We can get rid of a lot of it. Keep in mind, these games are 80-to-85% there. There's still lots of optimization left to do."

"But what about the hardcore games? The FPSs, the gameplay that requires 100% accuracy?" I push.

"Kinect isn't going to replace the controllers that have worked for those types of games for the last decade—that's not what we're trying to do. Kinect will work alongside those controllers for hardcore games. For throwing a grenade, for vocal commands, for..."

"For head tracking??"

"Yes, head tracking! Exactly." He gets a big smile. He wants to say more. Bound by Microsoft confidentiality agreements, he can't.

I bolded that one quote.

So apparently, this is revolutionary, hands-free control, except when it's not. And I don't know about you, but I am very fired up about paying $149 to arm-motion a grenade.

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