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To Kinect, or not to Kinect: that is the question:

I’m sure many of you out there have been wondering if it’s worthwhile to pick up a Kinect. After all, it does currently hold the Guinness World Record for being the "fastest selling consumer electronics device". It sold an average of 133,333 units per day with a total of 8 million units in its first 60 days. All of that is impressive, right? But is it worth its weight in “Xbox Live Gold”?  I wanted to take this opportunity to share some of my own personal experiences with the Kinect and setting up a “Kinect ID” and hopefully answer that question for some, if not all of you.

Back in December, Mark Barlet, the President and CEO of the AbleGamers Foundation wrote an article titled “Kinect and the Disabled”. If you haven’t had a chance to read it yet, I strongly suggest that you do. In it, Mark examines not only the technology behind the Kinect, but also, what this technologies future potential is within the disabled community. One paragraph in particular that stood out to me was:

“Things like color blind options, remappable keys, and readable fonts allow a substantial percentage of the disabled gaming community further access to more videogames. However, the largest portion of the disabled gaming community who want to play AAA titles are those with mobility impairments.  For those of us who have muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy, or the use of only one hand, or difficulty standing, running, and jumping - the Kinect was not designed to incorporate us.”

Having Cerebral Palsy (CP) myself, I wanted to delve into this further and see what kind of limitations I was going to find in setting up my Kinect, and if there were any, what could I do to work around them? The first thing you should know about me is that I rarely let obstacles stand in my way of achieving my goals. With that said, I bought the Kinect fully knowing that there were going to be some games that I just wasn’t able to play. In my mind, that was okay because the voice and facial recognition technology that the Kinect uses was enough to persuade me purchase one on the day of its release. I mean common, who hasn’t wanted their very own HAL 9000...for those of you who don’t know who that is, it’s the fictional on-board computer from the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey”...anyways, I digress, one of the main features that Microsoft put in place to use this technology is in the set-up of your “Kinect ID”.

Kinect ID allows you to create a custom profile that syncs up with your existing Xbox LIVE Gamertag. Once this ID is created, you’ll be able to sign-in with either the wave of a hand or simply saying “Xbox Kinect” which then brings you to the Kinect Hub and gives you several on-screen options for what you’d like to do next. Furthermore, the Kinect even brings your Xbox Avatar into some games and knows who is playing at all times, this should be a breeze to set-up right? Well, not quite.

Let me start off by saying, it took my girlfriend and I a total of an hour and forty-five minutes to setup my Kinect ID. This isn’t how long it is supposed to take, it just took this long because the camera had some issues recognizing me. You see, the camera that the Kinect is equipped with a sensor that interprets 3D scene information from a continuously-projected infrared structured light...in other words, it uses lasers to determine your skeletal structure and placement in front the camera. Because of this, if there are any extra objects in your environment that the camera does not recognize or thinks is a part of you, the Kinect won’t know what to do and will restart the ID creation process.

Knowing in advance that I was probably going to have to stand during this process, I came prepared. I brought my cane, and walker out from the closet and was ready to try my best at the on-screen instructions.

Test # 1 – My Cane – I stood in front of the camera with my cane in my left hand. When the Kinect asked me to assume the first position, I did my absolute best, but I noticed that even when lifting my cane off the ground, the Kinect interpreted it as an extra arm bone and wasn’t allowing me to get into the required position in the allotted time given. To top it off, I found it extremely hard to move from square-to-square with my cane and quickly get into the new positions...eventually the Kinect gave up on me and started over from the beginning.

Test # 2 – My Walker – I thought that with my walker I’d for sure be able to pull this off because I could lean against it while placing my body in the positions and then be able to move quickly to the next square, well, I was wrong. Again the Kinect didn’t understand what my walker was, and because I wasn’t standing up straight enough for its liking, the set-up kicked me back to the start.

At this point I was starting to get a little frustrated, but I wasn’t willing to give up yet.

Test # 3 – My Girlfriend – That’s right, My Girlfriend. I figured she may be able to hold me up and move me quickly to each square, which would mean I’d finally be standing straight enough that the camera would recognize me. The problem is, the Kinect not only recognized I was standing there, but that there was someone behind me too. Next, my girlfriend dressed all in black and even covered her face with dark pantyhose in the attempt to not be picked up by the light sensors; unfortunately it was still picking up two sets of arms from her hold me up. This got us to thinking, What if my arms weren’t in the picture? (Warning: What I’m about to suggest I don’t recommend trying at home) So we tied my arms behind my back using a big sweater, with the intention that she would act as my arms in front of the camera and would let go of me “briefly” to perform the actions on screen...bad idea. We got half way through this when at one point I slipped and fell face first into the ground, not able to use my arms at the time to break my fall.

By now you can imagine that I was starting to think that this wasn’t going to work for me, but again I had one option left that I hadn’t considered.

Test # 4 – Wheelchair – Now I know you’re thinking “How is it going to work with the wheelchair? Especially when all other assistive devices failed” I was thinking the same thing but I had to give it a shot. I wheeled in front of the camera, and to my amazement, Kinect recognized me! This is excluding the fact that my legs just looked to be “floating” over the squares, and my waist was in a seated position, but it didn’t matter, it was progress nevertheless. I began going through the listed positions and the set up wasn’t restarting on me this time. I had finally completed the initial setup of my Kinect ID!

I realize that the examples I’ve given above aren’t going to work for all of you, but I wanted to share my personal experience, and the lengths I went to in order to create my Kinect ID. This doesn’t mean I’d now be able to play every game that comes out for the Kinect, in fact, I’m not able to play 90% of the Kinect games that are currently on the market because it still doesn’t understand why I’m in a seated position when it asks me to perform certain actions. What I can tell you is that the Kinect is an amazing piece of technology and I believe that eventually the software capabilities will match that of the hardware. Until then, I will have to continue using my Kinect as if it were the command center of my very own spaceship. I still feel like I’m in a Sci-Fi movie every time I bark out the instructions “Xbox Pause”...”Xbox Play” when I’m watching my favourite programs on Netflix, and for now that’s good enough for me.