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Kinect Review

Kinect Review - First presented to the world as Project Natal at E3 2009, Microsoft's Kinect sensor peripheral has since been positioned by the software (and hardware) giant as the next phase of Xbox 360's evolution as a platform. A combination of hardware and software, it's been billed as a means for users to interact with their consoles and play games without using a physical controller, using natural gestures, voice commands and face recognition.

I've had a final retail Kinect unit at home for a little over a week now, and have had ample time to put the shiny new gadget through its paces. Is it as magical as expected? Will it transform gaming? Or, more importantly, does it even work? Read on past the break for my in-depth review of this ambitious apparatus.

Kinect is a single piece of hardware, yet it incorporates several distinct technologies. There's an infrared emitter that floods your play space with invisible light, paired with a CMOS sensor that then looks at how it's reflected back and passes that data to the console -- as a grayscale image -- so that it can determine the depth of the scene, most importantly your movement in 3D space. Then there's an RGB camera that's used for facial recognition, in-game snapshots and video chat. The sensor contains four capsule microphones that, in combination with an audio processor, can "pinpoint" your voice, picking it out from background noise and even determine which direction it's coming from. Finally, there's a tilt motor, which automatically move the sensor up and down depending on the current user's height and distance from it.

Kinect Review
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