By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
Booh! on 22 June 2010
Edit Thread
slowmo said:

By the way just to shoot down some of the more annoying critics on here:

http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-12218-Video-Game-Examiner~y2010m6d21-Kiect-not-limited-to-2players-Has-unlimited-possibilites

At E3, PrimeSense showed a demonstration to JoyStiq which showed two-players going through a demo, though the camera technology did recognize more. This demonstration was built solely by PrimeSense and in no way has any relation or link to the software and game coding Microsoft has developed for Kinect. PrimeSense is the provider of the hardware chip for Microsoft, but Microsoft handles the rest, so the demo put on by PrimeSense does not reflect what Kintect can do in terms of total players.

The camera technology can detect an unlimited number of people, so if it's programmed in such a way, it can process and render more than two-players at a time. At the current time, Microsoft hasn't revealed how many players Kinect will support, but last year they did mention it could and would allow for 4-player gaming. PrimeSense did state that they do not know how many players Microsoft currently has Kinect setup to handle. With Kinect and the PrimeSense demonstration two completely separate entities, but the camera itself can detect a limitless number of people. It's solely limited based on the software that is implemented to the camera' hardware chip.

 

Enjoy

/thread

Not exactly: it is not software limited, it is hardware limited, as in processing power. PrimeSense already stated that the camera can track as many players as you wish (sort of), but that "it can only run calculations on two people at a time, just because the processing power required to track all of the body's locations and movements is so great". Since PrimeSense built the hardware and delivered the middleware, I doubt that it is possible to optimize the code in such a way that it doubles its performances.

btw, Kinect is $149.99 (http://store.microsoft.com/microsoft/Kinect-Sensor-for-Xbox-360/product/C737B081)

/Kinect