Yet Kinect often feels like a half-baked beta product. There are loads of issues that Microsoft and its partners need to work through.
For now, just about every Xbox game will either require Kinect or will be incompatible with it; there's almost nothing in between. And even the games that are designed for use with Kinect don't take full advantage of it.
Ubisoft's "Your Shape: Fitness Evolved" is a good example. Unlike the fitness games designed for the Wii or the PlayStation 3, you don't have to use any kind of controller or platform; you just stand in front of the screen and mimic the movements of your virtual trainer. That works well, but there were many points at which I wished the game tapped into Kinect's voice-recognition abilities. Instead of being able to tell the system my weight or that I'm a male, I had to try to touch tiny, on-screen buttons by waving my hand in the air. I almost wished I could just use a physical controller.
But it's not only the games that don't fully embrace Kinect. The Xbox system as a whole supports it only halfheartedly.
You can't use Kinect to navigate the Xbox's main screen. Instead, Microsoft has created a special Kinect area with only a handful of applications and options. Many popular features or settings are unavailable. If you want to access the Xbox Live marketplace, watch a movie on Netflix or log into Facebook on the Xbox 360, you need to grab your controller.
Even in the Kinect hub, the use of Kinect features is inconsistent. You can use your voice to specify which videos to watch in the ESPN application, but you can't use your voice to search for a movie or find a song in the Zune application. Instead, you have to wave at the screen. If your couch or seat isn't positioned directly in front of the Kinect sensor, you have to constantly stand up to interact with it, even if you just want to watch a movie.
In testing Kinect applications and games, I often found myself bouncing back and forth between using gestures, my voice or even the traditional controller, not because I wanted to, but because certain screens would demand that I interact with them in particular ways. The result was that the interface was a frustrating mess.
Kinect is brand-new, so it's not surprising that Microsoft and its partners are still trying to figure out how to best use it. I hope they do that soon, because it would be a shame to let Kinect's potential go to waste.
