Why The New Kinect Could Change Gaming Forever And Even Offer Amazing Medical Applications

The Kinect for the Xbox 360 was a fantastic piece of technology that turned a regular Xbox into something that felt as though it came from the future.

While the Wii had demonstrated demand for motion-controlled gaming, the Kinect took this to a whole new level by doing away with the need for controllers at all and actually reading the players' body movements accurately enough to translate them to in-game controls.

To kick a football you would no longer just press 'A', but actually swing your leg to connect with the on-screen ball and have the power and trajectory calculated and transformed into real results.

Unfortunately though the idea didn't quite take off the way it could have. Impressive though the Kinect was, it certainly still had its limitations which meant it was mostly useful as a novelty rather than a real replacement for the controller. Unfortunately developers also didn't quite take to the device meaning that there just weren't that many games for it and that there wasn't that much incentive for consumers as a result.

Enter: The New Kinect

But the next generation Kinect should change all that. Not only does the new version come bundled with the Xbox One ensuring that everyone who buys an Xbox will have one (offering great incentive to developers), but it also boasts significantly improved hardware which makes it far more accurate and sensitive.

With the new Kinect you can actually wiggle your fingers and it will detect where each of them is (meaning that air guitar could very well take on a whole new meaning). It can tell when your mouth is open or closed, how many people are in the room at once, and what other objects are in the room with you too.

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In fact, the new Kinect is so sensitive that it can even detect a person's heartrate by looking for tiny fluctuations in skin colour that denote beats of the heart - something that not even the human eye can do. It's almost so good it's scary…

And potentially this could change everything…

Incredible Applications

So how might this be used in games? Well demos have already demonstrated some intuitive and unique ways that the Kinect could be used in mainstream games. Multiplayer games for instance can identify who is holding a controller and pause the game intuitively as it's being passed around the room.

Who knew that multiplayer Wormsdeathmatches could benefit from a motion sensor? Other games let you use the controller as the main interface, but then incorporate other commands such as a touch to your own head to turn on and off the HUD, or pointing with a finger as a way to target on-screen baddies.

Of course the new Kinect will also lend itself perfectly to fitness games and programs. Not only will the sensor be accurate enough to tell when you're doing press ups or sit ups (and whether you're using correct form), but it can even detect how you're distributing your weight - and of course there are many applications for being able to detect a user's heart rate too.

This might even be useful outside of the living room, as a tool for helping to rehabilitate patients struggling with injuries or walking difficulties. Imagine being able to see precisely where you are going wrong with your current posture and being trained in how to walk remotely by a physiotherapist - it's more than possible.

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Other Hardware
More impressive still are demoes of the IllumiRoom, which is really unlike anything that's ever been seen outside of sci-fi and superhero movies and which shows how much more powerful the Kinect could be when combined with other hardware.

Here a projector works alongside the device in order to project an image onto your room that accounts for the location of the screen as well as all your furniture. This then turns the whole room into a suitable canvas for the projected image, allowing the screen to extend and fill the entire room, and allowing special effects such as lighting effects and heat blur to completely change the atmosphere of the environment.

And one can't help but wonder what might be possible were we to combine the new Kinect with the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset. This would allow you to freely walk around in a virtual environment with an avatar that exactly matched your movements, even to meet friends online and interact with them as though they were right in the room with you.

It's an incredible future, and amazingly it looks like gaming hardware could be what's going to lead the way…

  Jack Turner

About the Author:

Today’s author, Jack Turner, is a frequent blogger who shares insight on topics related to home renovation online. He writes for Freedom Lift Systems which installs exterior wheelchair lifts.