Yesterday, IGN claimed that Kinect only works when you stand. The verity of this claim was immediately called into question, with Microsoft executives like Greenberg claiming it to be a non-issue. Today, Kotaku posted a rather long article that discusses the issue, including anecdotes and quotations from developers working with Kinect at E3.
Here are the highlights:
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For the last several days I've been peppering the conversations I've had with game creators at this massive video game showcase with the "sitting question." Can Kinect really not work when you're sitting? Is that the reason why every Kinect developer makes me stand to play their game? Is the future of voice-controlled, gesture-triggered television viewing a future of watching TV while standing up? [...] What Game Creators SayOne developer with whom I spoke and who is familiar with how Microsoft is briefing studios making games for Kinect said the company has specifically advised developers to not make games that would involve the players sitting down. None of the games shown for Kinect at a showcase early in the week were set up for sitting. Kinectimals, a cute take on Nintendogs-style games, but with tiger cubs, was presented as a player-stand-here demo. That's logical, because the game involves walking up to the animal and then jumping or running or doing some other action you want the animal to replicate. The game's lead creator, Frontier Design's David Braben shrugged when I asked him if the game could be played sitting down. He guessed some of it might work, but it didn't sound like he'd tried, possibly because it was irrelevant to his game design. [...] You might have expected a seated Kinect experience from the Forza Motorsport team. [...] Nevertheless, you have to play this one standing up if you are playing it at E3. I asked one of the two members of Forza development studio Turn 10 if I could play their demo sitting down. They said I could not, that it was "optimized for standing." [...] Some developers with whom I was theorizing about this guessed that the Kinect would become confused by the bent knees of a seated gamer — that it would need a player to always return to a resting position that has all their joints on one flat plane, which is the case when you are standing, not when you are sitting. [...] You can open the driver's door of a virtual Ferrari and sit in the driver's seat. But, even in this Forza demo, when you sit in the driver's seat, you are standing in real life. That's the kind of thing that makes you wonder. [...] I'd be worried less about this sitting thing — and I would stop asking the "sitting question" — if I had not been made to watch a movie via Kinect while standing up. On Monday evening I participated in a brief demonstration of how Kinect could be used to control the Xbox 360 dashboard. This demonstration had me standing in front of the Kinect and using both hand-waves and voice commands to flip through menus on a TV and load applications such as movie-watching and video chat. There were chairs at this demo, but they were off to the side. I had to stand up. [...] I liked telling the Xbox 360 to pause a movie. I liked extending my hand and dragging the movie's progress bar left or right, as if I was using the Star Wars Force to fast forward and rewind. But, I asked the Microsoft people running the demo, could I drag a chair over and try this sitting down? No. "Sitting is something we're still calibrating for," one of them told me. [...] The Microsoft people pointed out that for entertainment applications like these I would be using a lot of voice commands and those would work just fine from a couch. That backs up the simulated Q&A bit from Microsoft about how, "when you want to enjoy movies, music, and ESPN on Xbox 360, you can control your entertainment hands free from the comfort of your couch." They don't say anything about games. And they don't say anything about relying on voice-command rather than body motion detection. [...] Sitting is an important, if not essential, posture for gaming. You sit to play Halo. You sit to play Fable. You can sit to play most Wii games, even though you risk of failing, flailing or injuring the people next to you. Sitting is good. Microsoft has presented Kinect as a control option relevant to all gamers. And developers have theorized that it could be used to enhance even the most hardcore — shall we call them "sitting-centric"? — games. How Kinect would work with a game we normally play seated is now an open question. |
Edit:
The article has been updated with a statement from a Micosoft spokesperson confirming that gesture control for the dashboard does not work while seated as of this time:
| UPDATE: A Microsoft spokesperson told me after the publication of this article that the company is certain that Kinect gesture control will work for movies, ESPN and other "entertainment" features before the sensor is launched. As I originally reported, that is not an implemented feature yet. The spokesperson was not able to provide any update on the Kinect's tolerance of a person who sits while playing games. |
