"Xbox Play"
If you have an older Xbox 360 model you do have to use the extension cable that comes with the sensor to trail around to one of the front USB ports to plug in your Wi-Fi adaptor, if indeed you use one. This is because the sensor has to plug into the back of your Xbox 360 to take advantage of the dedicated bus which doesn't share the bandwidth with anything else on your console. Boot up your console and you'll have to install drivers and software, which happens automatically and takes just a couple of minutes, occupying 175MB of storage on your hard-drive. Don’t ditch the controller just yet as you still need to calibrate and set-up Kinect! The peripheral checks for sound in your house that may interfere with its functionality and you’ll see it move up and down to find you in the play space. It will also check for how much space you have in your room, showing you what you do have and what it recommends. It gives you the chance to shift stuff out the way and change your set-up around and re-calibrate, but aside from my playing space being below the recommended amount, I was straight into the dashboard and ready to try out Kinect.The sensor tilts up and down searching for you, takes a mug shot which you can assign to a profile, and from this point forth whenever you log into any game it recognises you and asks if you want to sign in with the profile you chosen. It's a great little feature, and though it feels a little like Big Brother is watching you, it's quite a powerful moment that showcases just how living room technology has progressed. Your first chance to try out the sensor is in the Kinect hub where you move your hands left and right, up and down to scroll though the menus, or use voice activation to navigate, saying the likes of "Xbox Play’ and "Dashboard" to move around and execute commands. Having wrestled with the Wii Mote on more than one occasion, having absolutely nothing in your hands feels so much more natural and intuitive. It recognises even the slightest movement of your hands as you point at icons and fluidly navigate the dash and therefore connects you totally to the experience. It's quite a moment when you first test it out.
Sadly though, there's a real lack of Kinect functionality with the dashboard. We should see this improved in an update, but currently you can use Kinect only within the Kinect Hub, rather than the complete dashboard. When you enter the hub, either by navigating to it with your hands, or saying the word 'Kinect,' you see a window in the bottom right hand of the screen with you standing in it, providing you're standing in front of the camera. With a little wave of your right hand you activate Kinect and then can move around the dashboard. You’ll also notice a little hand icon or a microphone icon, which indicates that you can use voice activation, and you might want to test it out by pausing and playing movies within the Zune player. It works very well, there's no doubt about that, but it's functionality is quite restricted.
In fact, I don't use Kinect to navigate the dashboard now at all. It's much slower than using the traditional controller. You have to hover your hand over an icon and wait for it to load, keeping your hand in place for about 3 seconds. The fact that voice control, which does work very well and even picks up my strong West Midlands accent, also has limited use is also disappointing. I thought I'd be able to sit on my sofa and tell the Xbox exactly what I want it do and where I want it to go, but it turns out I actually have to stand up in front of it, wait for it to recognise me, then use some gesture controls, and some voice activation and still use my controller to get to certain areas of the dash. It just needs to be streamlined. I'd fully expect Microsoft to sort this out, so hopefully it shouldn't be a problem for too long.
Continued overleaf...
