Category: Gaming

Ok, go slow and take this with a big pinch of salt, this may not be true at all, but no one has used the Kinect extensively, so this cannot be untrue too right now.

One of our posts made it to the N4G home page recently, and while browsing through the comments on the post (comment #4 by mricecreamman), I saw something interesting which says that there might be some problems with the Microsoft Kinect sensors right now.

Here is the comment text from the image above (emphasis added):

i work for microsoft here in out west and gotta say it’s pretty fun, but it’s not a wii killer. if too many people is around the sensor it becomes non responsive and sometimes it has latency. this is just a replica of when sony came out with the eyetoy..which it didn’t do so well.

Now there are a few things here, the person in question says that the Kinect is pretty fun but not a Wii killer. I have to agree with that fact, because Wii is in a different league altogether. Wii is for fun gaming, exercising, dancing, playing Mario and more and not for playing Call of Duty, for which you will of course use the Xbox 360. Wii in itself has a cult status amongst its users for motion gaming.

Another important point this person brought up was the fact that if too many people crowd around the device sensor it become non responsive and has latency, so this means that the device is definitely not ready for house parties yet and is a bit buggy. Once again, this might be a non-issue when Kinect actually comes out on November 4. Another aspect of this claim is that neither has Microsoft demoed Kinect with a crowd and neither will be there games which will require lot of people to be near the sensor at once.

This issue might not be a big issue at all, however, it could be a problem when you have a crowd around or maybe use the Kinect to play Wii like games :).

Last but not the least, the person compared the device to EyeToy, a digital camera device which Sony came out with for the PS2 which used computer vision and gesture recognition to process images taken by the camera. Now, no Microsoft employee would like to compare their own device with, but like I said it could just be an anonymous person out there. With 100K plus employees you will always get one who does not like the product or place they work for.

Based on the comment by the person, it is fairly OK to say that even if this is true, I never had a doubt in my mind that Kinect would kill the Wii, it would take a real long time for them to do it. However, more importantly the sensor issue (if it exists) still has almost 4+ months to be fixed, so by November 4 you might not even see those issues. However, what if Microsoft can’t fix it or not live up to the expectations they have build up?