One of the solutions Microsoft lands on ends up being a controversial — and very expensive — one. We sold 10 million Xbox Kinect units in the first [60] days, or something like that, so, you know, however many dollars it was, it was more than 10 million.
That immersion is broken, Velazquez argues, if players are constantly having to adjust the device so that the camera can detect them. It should be easy to start. It should work for everyone. Get the family together. Get together Mom and Dad and kids, and have an adventure, compete against each other. Kinect Adventures, developed by a team of approximately 40 people at Microsoft Studios subsidiary Good Science Studio, is made as a pack-in title for Kinect.
It features five different game types, including Reflex Ridge, where players race along a moving platform avoiding, ducking from, or jumping over obstacles along a path. The game is also a good chance to test the in-development Kinect on video games.
In Redmond, Washington , where Microsoft is based, group program manager Richard Irving is brought on board to help ensure the Kinect will be a commercial success. From the jump, Kinect is an ambitious project.
The device is to combine depth technology, skeletal tracking, and voice recognition, all into one mass-produced product that needs to hit a standard retail price for a video game peripheral — before a lot of this technology has been produced at such a scale.
So, Microsoft pulls Irving and a group of other leaders from their current projects and places them on the Kinect initiative to figure it out. When Microsoft begins to dig in to all the variables its new product will encounter in homes around the world, it becomes evident that there is no easy solution. Microsoft needs to test for as many ethnicities, accents, dialects, skin tones, hair types, clothing types, and other variables as possible to get Kinect out the door.
Employees at the company at large, not just in the Xbox division, are invited to take home and test out pre-release hardware. It is QA testing on a mass scale. Letting employees take Kinects home helps expose the in-development hardware to numerous variables it might not easily encounter at Microsoft. A former lead at Microsoft Studios, speaking to Polygon anonymously because of nondisclosure agreements he signed while with the company, says the Kinect had trouble sensing his wife, a tall Asian woman.
English than it did if you had an accent. The Kinect is no longer just an Xbox project — it is a Microsoft project. Nongaming divisions of the company, such as Microsoft Research and Windows, are brought on board to help out.
Doing so requires inventing new manufacturing processes, techniques, and equipment. To test this new pipeline, Microsoft builds a facility that allows the company to invent and refine the processes needed to get Kinect made.
The Kinect having so many people on board is exciting, people interviewed for this story say. When you look at what Microsoft cared about [with] Kinect, they really cared about the future of computing. So as a creator I could suddenly envision a new way of personalizing gameplay, the gameplay experience, making it possible to even change the paradigm of storytelling and of social interaction. All in all, Microsoft spends around 25 minutes of its press briefing talking about Kinect.
It shows off a game where players can use their hands to paint on a digital canvas, and a soccer experience where players wave their hands to deflect incoming soccer balls. The developer is deep in research and development, trying to figure out what its next big franchise will be. Its conclusion is a full-body dancing game. Initially, Rigopulos says, the idea is that players will strap on 3D spatial trackers to their wrists and ankles — either devices created by Harmonix, which had plenty of experience developing peripherals, or an off-the-shelf alternative.
Neither option, he adds, is ideal. Patrick Hackett , on the other hand, is unimpressed with Kinect. For developers , making games for Kinect often means fundamentally changing design philosophies, and having to change ways of thinking around simple features such as menus.
On the one hand, at Harmonix, this requires a lot of iteration and experimentation, and, in the case of menus, completely starting from scratch and having to reinvent design and user interface primitives, Rigopulos says. On the other hand, it is artistically liberating for the company to get the chance to reinvent the wheel. Some employees get creative when testing games on Kinect. Kristie Fisher, a game user researcher for Microsoft, invites friends — who are willing to sign nondisclosure agreements — over to QA-test the game Dance Central.
Numerous people use cardboard cutouts in place of actual humans when running skeletal tests. And the Kinect was perfect in that it did all of the heavy lifting and it gave you this box to play in. So all you had to do is, you just had to be willing to go apeshit inside of that box — which was very much the style of Double Fine development.
Double Fine especially has fun when developing for Kinect. To test games, employees bring their kids into work. They take the hardware out in public, bringing still-in-development Kinect games to bars and restaurants. Sometimes, waiters and waitresses get so intrigued by what Double Fine is doing, they come over and play too. They find plenty of other ways to play with the peripheral, though.
It was really gross. Which is, of course, not shippable. Focusing on family-friendly games comes down to pinpointing what features the company wants to put front and center when revealing Kinect to the world, says Irving. And there [was] a set of games that lended themselves to stand-up, full-body tracking — and they were much more family-oriented.
It appealed to a broader audience than the standard video game console. Kinect, Microsoft hopes, will do the same thing. But targeting a device and games toward children means testing them with children. Which is no easy feat. Whereas the Wii could only monitor the movement of one hand, Microsoft could offer full-body skeletal tracking, identifying physical gestures and the tech could even recognize faces. When it launched in , it was a substantial hit, selling 10 million units in its first eight months on sale and winning the Guinness World Record for the fastest-selling gadget.
In total, it sold around 35 million units across its lifespan. That meant that -- at the time -- nearly one in five Xbox owners was packing a Kinect, but what about those other four? Nevertheless, a handful of developers built games for Kinect, which was a natural home for music, rhythm and fitness games. Playing a dance game on the Kinect, especially coming from the rough-and-ready one-handed tracking of the Wii, was a revelation.
Microsoft subsequently wanted to assuage developer anxieties and went all-in on Kinect for its next-generation console. But adding a Kinect to the package put Microsoft at a disadvantage against Sony. That hurt developers like Harmonix that had stayed with the Kinect through its rocky birth just as they launched the big-budget Fantasia: Music Evolved.
For many, Kinect was their first real exposure to a voice-controlled gadget. Even worse, you might get it home and discover it's not actually usable in your house. After a few days of tinkering with the device and more than one run back to the game store, I can definitively tell you that there are a number of strong reasons why you might not want to buy a Kinect. I live in a pretty large house. Our entertainment center is in a large, open great room that flows into our dining area and then into the kitchen.
This one area is bigger than some apartments I've lived in true story. So when I tell you that the Kinect requires way more space than you might expect, keep this room in mind. The Kinect needed more space than this room could offer. First, as the image below shows, the Kinect claims to need a minimum of six feet. But when we set up the Kinect almost exactly like in the picture it did not register either of two adults one smaller, one larger properly.
We had to be at least eight feet away. Most people don't sit that far away from their TVs to watch TV. Microsoft knows this, because before Kinect Adventures loads, it shows pictures of players moving not just side chairs and a coffee table, but moving the entire couch out of the way to play using the Kinect.
If you want to play with two people, the area required becomes even more. With one person and a play space about six feet wide, we still bumped into pictures on the wall on one side and a computer monitor on a desk on the other. For one person, you need a space about eight feet wide. But that's not all. You don't just play with the Kinect on a single plane. You might start eight feet away, but then need to move back another six to eight feet. In fact, the area required by the Kinect when doing its original facial recognition processing was close to eight feet by eight feet -- and that was once the player was eight feet away from the Kinect.
Once you get to two people, you need a space at least 12 feet wide. That's wider than many rooms. Otherwise, you're going to be crashing into each other, bashing each other, and possibly poke your eye out.
The bottom line is this: the Kinect requires an astonishing amount of space 16 feet by 8 feet is about the workable minimum and if you can't easily produce that space, you're not going to enjoy the Kinect. Your kids might like it, but they'll wind up breaking things, go to the hospital, develop a negative association with Thanksgiving or Christmas, and never, ever come to visit you in your old age. Yes, this could be related to the first reason, but the simple fact is that if you do decide to go with a space smaller than the bridge of the Enterprise with the helm and navigation stations, Captain's chair, and handrail dividers all removed , you will break things.
Okay, I know this sounds ludicrous, but that's because you've probably never been married. If you're married, you'll understand how things are when your wife really wants something. Let's say you bring home the Kinect and your wife decides she likes one of those dance games -- but it's not comfortable playing anywhere in the house. It won't happen immediately, but sometime soon, you'll start hearing suggestions why it might be a good idea to move.
Oh, sure. The claim might be that it's to move to a better neighborhood, or get a better rate on a mortgage, or be near a better school, but we know better. Next: Reasons 4, 5, and 6 ». Back when the Wii first came out and we were all flinging that little Wii controller back and forth, some of us found that our arms started to hurt. Pretty quickly, the condition was named Wii Elbow.
With the Kinect, you're flinging your whole body all over. If you think your elbow hurt, try playing Reflex Ridge in Kinect Adventures.
By the time you're done ducking, weaving, bobbing, jumping, and squatting, your whole body is going to be in a mess of hurt. Wii Elbow was bad enough, but be careful out there.
We don't want a whole nation of Kinect Koncussion sufferers. The Kinect is an amazing interface.
0コメント