http://123kinect.com/scoop-small-room-try-magnieye-for-microsoft-kinect/16249/

There have been talks about the minimum room size required for using the Xbox Kinect for almost a year now, but in a small apartment where you can hardly fit a couches and a plant you can generally forget about playing Xbox Kinect games. Luckily, for those willing to pay a little more  to play the Kinect in theirsmall rooms, Newbie Games will soon release a solution (August 1st to be exact)!

Look at what we found on Amazon US: MagniEye for Microsoft Kinect (Silver) (or the black version)

MagniEye Kinect features

The product features leave little room for speculation:

• Special magnifier lens brings in Kinect’s field of vision
• Allows the Kinect to be used in much smaller sized rooms
• Easy installation; no modification to your Kinect needed

It looks as though the MagniEye is a lens that can be put on the Kinect to make the bundle of infra-red light smaller and so you will need less space to have fun!

If, and how, it works remains to be seen but this may make the Kinect do a lot better in Japan’s generally small rooms. Are you going to need an accessory like this in your room?

i dont see it turning loads of people towards kinect,  but its a good idea for a device and would actually be really good for kinect in japan where alot of rooms and houses their are alot more cramped

"It looks as though the MagniEye is a lens that can be put on the Kinect to make the bundle of infra-red light smaller and so you will need less space to have fun!"

That would make it playable in larger rooms, from further away.  You need to make the divergence of the infrared bundle bigger not smaller. Bad name for the product since you would need a wide-eye lens (zoomed out) to make it suitable for smaller rooms.

A magnifier lens would help with facial and finger recognition, but would make full body tracking impossible.

And wouldn't you need 3 lenses, 1 for the infrared emitter and 2 for the two cameras?  Plus a software patch to line the 2 images up again and correct the distortion from the wide-eye lens. It doesn't sound like it will work very well.