Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

The article was well matched to its topic; like modern video games, its flashy and high tech, but nothing new or interesting.

I had to laugh at the kinect video. The white/beige featureless walls with no human pictures in its field of view, the actors wearing extremely high contrast clothes, the incredible cinematography style smooth and even lighting... My real world experiences with the kinect on a 360 have been super aggravating and frankly I hate the GD thing. Hey, all you need to do, is remodel and redecorate your home and buy new clothes... No, instead I think, F microsoft, my plan will be to not buy another kinect instead, they need my money more than I need their aggravation. Don't get me wrong, its really cool for about the first 15 minutes until it gets super aggravating.

As a disclaimer after the initial newness wore off I tend to use the 360 for living room youtube viewing (you need to disable kinect and voice recognition or miscues will drive you insane) and multi-player minecraft on the same screen at the same time is entertaining. And I play Forza although the review notes the new version has been neutered and downgraded so I don't want it.

Disclosure: I'm an XBox hardware engineer and encourage you to try the new kinect before writing it off. It is completely re-engineered with new time-of-flight technology that achieves orders of magnitude more precision than the last gen. This is not some BS hardware hype either, it translates into better real world use cases. I've never had to wear any special clothes or paint my walls... it just works for me. It will also work in nearly pitch black environments.

I think the hardware/software co-design for this particular peripheral was done phenomenally well, and MS has had some time to refine its use cases and integration into the system. I'm really excited to see where this goes.

> Hey, all you need to do, is remodel and redecorate your home and buy new clothes...

A friend of mine is an editor for a tech magazine, and has been playing with the Xbone (I totally read that as EX-bone now...) -- the Kinect is a thousand times better now, in that regard.

Then they should have done a video in my somewhat less well lit living room, with a couch that's the same color as my wife's shirt, and a stereotypical wedding pix in the background and peculiar shadows.

If its higher performance, well, show it!

The real killer is the concept. The highest performance way to do "up down enter" on a menu is obviously a controller not an arm and camera.

Kinect doesn't have to work very well for my daughter to have fun with her dance games. But for a UI to a menu, it does kinda actually have to work all the time, which is a meta-UI issue. If it was just a dancin' jumpin' peripheral, which its "good enough" for, then I'd be very happy, but no its gotta be implemented as the worlds cruddiest most aggravating menu navigation system, which makes it an epic fail.

My carpenters hammer is a great tool for nail installation, but an epic fail at screw installation and forcing everyone to use hammers to install screws is just going to piss people off.

Fair points!

His opinion of it was that the voice navigation is far more useful than the "swipe your hand like an idiot" bits.

I had to disable voice navigation because I'd be watching a youtube video or whatever, and my daughter would be talking to my wife across the room or the next room, and I'd randomly get restarting or skipped videos or whatever. I decided it was misinterpreting conversations in the room as me saying "xbox, next" or whatever. I don't recall if I software disabled it (is there an option?) or the old fashioned hardware disable using duct tape and stuff. Its been months since I've had a problem, so I have no proof (logs or whatever) but the correlation is interesting. (Edited to add, I'm not even sure the yt app supports voice... but the correlation with "I got really pissed off and shut off a bunch of features" and "it works better now" still exists)

Once kinect and voice are disabled, it is a pretty decent console.

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