Our older son had wanted an XBox for a long time, but I was loath to add yet another gaming console to our Gamecube and Wii. With the release of the Kinect controller, however, I could no longer resist as I badly wanted it myself! So over the holidays we got one and it is as amazing as everyone says. As in the early days of the Wii, it is some of the simplest games that provide the greatest satisfaction, such as the Kinect Adventures game that shipped with the XBox-Kinect bundle. Watching the onscreen character perform the same motions as oneself without holding any extra gear is simply amazing. I have yet to find someone who is not completely blown away by the experience.
What makes the Kinect controller especially interesting though is that it was rapidly hacked and people have been coming up with incredible new uses for it. You can now use the Kinect to control a robot. Most importantly though, you can use the Kinect to control your avatar in virtual worlds, such as playing World of Warcraft. This is an important step in the direction of something akin to the Metaverse. It was timely that over the holidays I re-read Snow Crash. We now have a controller available with the Kinect that lets people participate in a virtual world without learning any special commands. Kinect even has the capability to detect facial expressions, which will allow the software to mirror those.
I believe the Kinect, and the improvements to it that are sure to follow, will prove to be a huge boon to virtual worlds. Initially, that will likely be games. But it might also give a second life to Second Life by transforming the participation experience – not just for moving around in the world, but also manipulating objects and interacting with others. Or maybe someone else will come along instead and build a world from the ground up that’s optimized for use with a controller such as Kinect (including the facial expressions of participants). We might get even more innovation here if someone figured out a protocol that lets avatars roam and specifies how worlds are connected to each other so that the construction of experiences can proceed in a distributed fashion.
