Lag could be an issue. But the tech impresses.
Some interesting tidbits.
Read the full article at: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-kinect-tech-analysis
It's difficult to dislike what Microsoft has done, despite the fact that none of the games on offer were designed to appeal to the core audience that has loyally stuck by the platform over the last five years. Behind the Avatar-driven, cutesy, cartoon-style games is a technological masterpiece that is simply a breathtaking achievement: full-motion capture of multiple players simultaneously combined with excellent quality voice recognition, all in a consumer-level package.
Kinect has a traditional RGB camera in it, as found in a multitude of webcams and mobile phones, and it's capable of a standard 640x480 resolution, operating at 30 frames per second. Alongside this are the depth sensors. These bathe the area in an infra-red wash, colour-coding the scene based on how far away the objects are. This is the key to Kinect's unique capabilities. Not only does it allow games to know where everyone and everything is in 3D space, but it also means that even without the RGB data it can operate just fine in any lighting conditions - even pitch black.
The depth map is the most crucial weapon in Kinect's arsenal, and it can also be integrated with the traditional RGB webcam image in a process known as registration, although the integration of the two planes together does incur a small additional CPU load. However, even without registration, we can see that developers are making use of it in the launch titles, visualising it directly into the game.
The question is, fancy technical trickery aside, does it actually work? Up in the massive penthouse suite Microsoft had reserved for the event, things were already getting busy when we arrived. While the gameplay areas around each pod were taped off, there was still plenty of potential interference from people wandering about into the camera's field of view and also from flash photography potentially upsetting the IR beams from the depth cams.
However, in all but one instance Kinect worked beautifully, with only a single pod - running cartoon racing title Joy Ride - posing any sort of issue. Even this turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Looking to debug the problem, the game's caretaker returned to the development dash and loaded up the "NUI" debug tool. I managed to get a sneaky photo of this tool in action - essentially it shows the people in view picked up on the depth camera, and then assigns skeletal movement points to them.
So, not much has changed in terms of the performance level compared to what we played a year ago. You still need to think ahead and react in advance somewhat to make sure that you hit all those balls, with lag in the 200ms range (including the latency from the display, of course). It's the sort of shift that you're likely to make naturally as you get to grips with the way the system works.
But just how much of a burden on the CPU are the NUI libraries, as they're referred to by Microsoft? Bearing in mind the fact that we have excellent motion-tracking on a consumer-level device, and that the processing chip in the original Natal design was removed in favour of a software layer implemented on the 360 itself, you could be forgiven for thinking that game performance would be impacted by the additional load.
Well, the initial rumours about the use of one core of the Xenon CPU are clearly way off beam based on the games we've seen. Kudo Tsunoda's Kinect Adventures is running some very attractive visuals using the Unreal Engine, which probably wouldn't take kindly to being run on an effectively crippled CPU.
However, the best example we've seen yet is the demo of the Kinect rendition of Forza Motorsport at the Microsoft media briefing. There's little doubt that the action on-stage wasn't scripted (as per the Project Natal Experience the night before) and here we are seeing the same silky smooth 720p60 that we've come to expect from Turn 10's excellent racing titles.
Coming back from the hands-on event, it's clear to see that Microsoft - depending on the price of the final product - has something of a winner on its hands, and I was pleasantly surprised at how the cutting-edge tech had morphed into a series of games that, for the most part, will go down very well with the intended audience.
These guys and girls aren't really going to give a toss about matters like latency, or the question of whether Kinect will work well with titles aimed at the hardcore. For the sort of crowd that were attracted by the Wii, it's clear that Kinect works, and offers something genuinely new and exciting.
But where does this leave us, the hardcore gamers? We may have to wait to see how those Star Wars and Forza Motorsport games due next year turn out.
