Xbox Kinect: game for a game?
As the Xbox Kinect goes on sale in the UK, Channel 4 News’ Technology Correspondent Benjamin Cohen roadtests it on his grandmother.
Gaming fans began queuing for the eagerly awaited Kinect – a hands-free gaming device that works with Xbox 360s – at 9am on Oxford Street ahead of its midnight launch at Game.
Kinect uses two cameras to sense your body position and movement, it listens to your voice and recognises your face – you only need to stand in front of it to activate it.
Gaming fans will need to fork out £130 for the gadget, with hardcore gamers facing a second night of queuing in the cold – after last night’s midnight release of the hotly-anticipated game Call of Duty: Black Ops.
Some of the high-profile Kinect-enabled games set to be released before Christmas including Dance Central, in which players mirror moves they see on screen, the child-friendly Kinectimals and Kinect Sports.
Nineteen games are due to launch this month alone, including the family-targeted Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, alongside a string of fitness games to rival the Wii’s success in sports.
"For the past four years at Channel 4 News and for two years at the Times Online, I've found myself often asking PR people "how does this matter to my Grandma" when they're trying to convince me to cover their latest gadget or website.
Tonight for Channel 4 News, we took that concept a little further. Microsoft bods had been telling me that the new X-Box Kinect would appeal to everyone in the family from teenage boys to grandmas, so I invited my Grandma Norma to have a go at Dance Central, a new game specially designed for the Kinect.
She loved it..."
Read more on Benjamin Cohen's blog: Road testing the X-Box Kinect with my grandma
Stephen McGill, Microsoft’s director of Xbox for the UK and Ireland, said: “Kinect for Xbox 360 is set to revolutionise the way people consume entertainment, not just games but movies, music and keeping in touch with friends and family.
“Playing Kinect is natural, intuitive and brilliantly fun, and we’re very excited to bring it to hundreds of thousands of families across the country this Christmas.”
Hacked in the US
Launched in the US four days ago, American retailers expect the Kinect to outsell both the Nintendo WiiMotion Plus and Sony’s offering, the PlayStation Move.
Kinect has sold out already in the States, prompting Microsoft to increase its sales estimates from three million to five million, over the Christmas season.
Yet days after its US launch, the Kinect was hacked into after a hardware developer in New York set a $2000 challenge to hack the Kinect – in order to unlock the hardware for other devices.
Offering the $2000 bounty, Adafruit told US media: “It’s amazing hardware that shouldn’t be locked up for Xbox 360. Its radar camera being able to get video and distance as a sensor input from commodity hardware is huge.”
An amateur hacker from a member of the Natural User Interface Group claimed to have freed the Kinect from the Xbox, controlling the device from his Windows PC.