Microsoft Kinect: The AnandTech Review
by Brian Klug on December 9, 2010 3:20 PM ESTESPN
So how are the apps? In general there’s nothing to complain about, they just work. ESPN isn’t exactly my cup of tea, but it’s interesting since the video-scrub and select gesture lives in here. If your ISP is a compatible partner, you get access to a variety of live games, event highlights, and other videos. I’m on Cox, note that there’s ISP branding in the top right below the ESPN symbol showing that my ISP qualifies me to use this feature.
It’s actually pretty cool you can pull up a list of live events and stream them whenever you want. They’ll continue streaming for a short time inside the large screen until you scrub to other videos.
Inside of an actual video, the controls are a bit interesting. Moving your hand up to the top brings up a video scrubber bar, where you can control fast forward and rewind speed by moving your hand left or right. Moving your hand down then selects the current frame and starts playing. There’s not really any buffering, you just start with a low quality connection and gradually scale up. HD isn’t bad, but there still are some compression artifacts and blocking with fast motion, but it’s close to Netflix quality.
Interestingly enough, when watching live events one of my immediate curiosities was what happens during commercial breaks. Sure enough, a few minutes in and I found out:
Though that’s boring, the fact that ESPN is willing to risk it all and offer streaming live events to Xbox Live subscribers is pretty awesome, and I can’t complain about the Kinect interaction. The only awkward part of this experience is that the hand gestures are best suited to you standing in front of the display - as with all Kinect interactions. It’s a reasonable expectation that you’d want to watch a game or video sitting down, and although you can select things with your hands whilst sitting, it just doesn’t work as well.
Zune
The Kinect Zune client is probably the most barebones of the notable preinstalled Kinect applications. Fire it up, and you get a screen with the usual suspects in the same Kinect style - a grid of large tiles.
What I find a bit strange here is that there really aren’t many audio commands cues beyond suggesting a movie. In fact, the problem really rises from the fact that Kinect doesn’t understand words, names, and titles that aren’t in its voice recognition corpus.
ESPN gets around this by cleverly having you vocalize which number video you want played - video one through six are your options. You can’t just speak the name of the game or the title. Similarly, you can’t search.
Last.fm
The Kinect-tailored Last.fm experience is similarly laid out. Six tiles you can hover over and make selections with the same way the rest of the Kinect interface Microsoft has put together works.
What’s interesting about both the Last.fm and Zune applications is that hovering over the large back arrow takes you back into the controller-land versions of these applications. You’re transported essentially right back into the vanilla experience that existed before Kinect - this is just another way of getting there. Waving your hands around inside those experiences brings you into the Kinect-ified versions of those programs.
The big question mark in my mind is where the Kinect version of Netflix is. Netflix on Xbox 360 is admittedly rich enough to get by without needing a Kinect environment, but it’d be nice to see Netflix given the Kinect treatment the same way the rest of the core Xbox services have been.
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Noriaki - Thursday, December 9, 2010 - link
Yeah, I just meant the 350 part. Referring to it as the 360 S to distinguish it from the 360 Pro makes sense to me.Noriaki - Thursday, December 9, 2010 - link
PS: Thanks for the in-depth coverage. This is the first time I feel like I got a good idea of what having a Kinect in my living room would mean for practical things like where my couch lives.Aikouka - Thursday, December 9, 2010 - link
Brian, have you tried out DanceMasters (DM)? I noticed you commented on how your girlfriend compared Dance Central (DC) to DDR where DanceMasters is actually created by Konami.I own DM and have played the DC game, and I have to say... you'd probably be disappointed in the DM menu system as it is a tad bit harder to control. Way too often I found myself skipping past the option I wanted (as all options move left or right) and you then have to raise your (right) hand to select it. The problem comes when it might see you move your hand out to the right and actually shift your choice over one right before you raise your hand.
The part where I think DM beats DC is the actual dancing. In the demo for DC, I found it awkwardly difficult to pay attention to the way the dancer was moving (left or right, etc) and the upcoming movement that was shown on the right side of the screen. When my brother and his girlfriend played, I noticed one huge trend... we *all* would miss the first dance move after they changed from one move to another.
This is kind of better in DM, because it uses arrows that signify how your hand (or hands) should move in a second or two. There are also circles that will appear on the screen and you must hit them with either your hands or feet (obvious depending on the location). The last movement is the "pose silhouettes" that appear on the left and right side and are green in color. They move to the center of the screen and when the two silhouettes combine, you are supposed to be in that pose. The only problem is that it's not terribly picky on what you do in between these three types of inputs and another problem is that it loves to put circles beneath your feet (so you keep moving), but they're hard to notice. I found this easy to combat by simply always moving your feet.
Overall, there's a huge difference in the style of music between the two as well, which influenced my decision. I've never been a "Top 40s" kinda guy and I've played DDR quite a bit, so I went with the game that had the music style I was used to ( and also considering that I've heard quite a bit of Eurobeat, which DM also has ).
The one thing that was always fun about DC was the "freestyle" section where it shows you as this sort of glowing silhouette and you just do whatever dance you want. At the end, it will play this back to you in a sort of time-lapse video (which you can then save).
To talk about a different game, I noticed some problem with jumping in Kinect... mostly in the rail-based obstacle course. Maybe I was just doing little hops and Kinect didn't register it... maybe it was a problem with the cargo pants (khaki color, so they're fairly flesh-toned) that I was wearing. It was pretty crazy though... at one point I had to duck down, so I dropped to my knees and then needed to switch sides, so I pulled out the Starfox-esque barrel roll! Kinect did actually sense that correctly.
The one thing I did notice is that it is *very* common in Kinect Adventures for it to yell at me about getting too close or too far... especially in the bubble popping mini-game.
Brian Klug - Thursday, December 9, 2010 - link
I haven't checked out Dance Masters, but I'm starting to think that I definitely should. I think at the time when I originally put together this list of games, that wasn't available and I overlooked it. I'll grab it and maybe update with a page or two.It's interesting how dancing games are quickly becoming something Kinect is very well suited for. I definitely agree about jumping and the clothing choice, I have a pair of cargo shorts that just don't work with most of the titles, and Kinect Adventures does yell a lot about position, agreed.
-Brian
GSJ - Thursday, December 9, 2010 - link
If only i could use this with my p.c.....ExarKun333 - Thursday, December 9, 2010 - link
I purchased the Kinect soon after the launch and I came to pretty much the same conclusions are Brian. The lag is there, but acceptable. More importantly, the games are FUN. MS did a great job with this launch. The hardware is easy to install and configure, and the games are easy to pick up on. I agreed 100% that the menus in DC are superior to the method in the Dashboard. Maybe an update at some time? :)knowom - Thursday, December 9, 2010 - link
267ms on a DAW would be completely unthinkable in fact most people that play or record music try to stay below 10ms.I'm just using that example as a clear easy to demonstrate reason to why 267ms is a abysmal amount of input lag you can completely rule out music based kinect games as well as any twitch/quick reflex input games or applications.
SodaAnt - Thursday, December 9, 2010 - link
In the comment about the laser probably being 650-700 nm, that is wrong. 650nm is the wavelength of a normal red laser pointer. Normal IR diodes lase at either 780, 808 or 980nm.Brian Klug - Thursday, December 9, 2010 - link
Hmm it's on the fringes of what I'd consider visible, but 780 probably is a much better choice. I'll update.-Brian
mcnabney - Thursday, December 9, 2010 - link
Okay, I am probably the only prig to bring this up, but the distances required seem to be a problem for some not often thought of reasons.9-12 feet of clearance appears to be required, which means the sofa will need to be 15' back (unless you move it every time you fire up the Kinnect).
I would point out that you would need to have a 55"+ HDTV to fully benefit from the 1080p image from the Kinnect playing area, For regular game playing / movie watching on the sofa (behind the playing area) you would require a 100"!!!!! screen to fully resolve the 1080p image that the Xbox360 or a BluRay player is capable of displaying.
For this thing to really work in a robust media environment (and most living rooms) it should have been able to to work perfectly with the user standing 3-5' from the screen.