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Monthly Archives: June 2010

Kinect For?

(Note: this was written this morning before Microsoft’s keynote)

Ah, E3 – the gamer’s equivalent of Christmas. Finding out about the newest hardware and software in the gaming market is an exciting time, especially considering that this year looks to have major announcements in both hardware and software (Which, for the most part, is hardware announced last year coming to fruition).

The big news to start off E3 is a large amount of details about the previously codenamed Project Natal, now known as the Kinect. In case you’d been living under a rock for the past year, Kinect is the motion sensor for the XBOX360. This itself is not a new console – this is something that will attach to your existing console and have games specifically written for the platform. This isn’t intended to be the death of the controller, this is intended to be an add-on to expand the possibilities of the console and appeal to a section of the market that the XBOX isn’t appealing to it right now.

For Microsoft, the Kinect is a great way to make the console more appealing to those people who are currently looking at a Wii, or are bored with the fact that there are a lot of games that simply add motion in because they can without using it to enhance the game in what I call the “Waggle Effect”. This add-on is designed to get the two markets that the XBOX is currently weak in: younger people (As in people fourteen and below), and the people who are middle aged and older. Microsoft is smart – they know that controller games aren’t going away anytime soon for the hardcore gamers (Which is the majority of their console sales), and what they want to do is target more family friendly, active and social games to parents for both their children and themselves. If Microsoft can get their product in the household early, then by the time they get into more mature, suited titles they have the hardware already there.

Launch titles are looking a little meager right now, with a couple of Wii rip-offs and a Star Wars lightsaber game, but I really think that the greatest potentials for this device are more programs and specialty material than anything. Someone online mentioned the idea of a Yoga tutorial on this thing, and I think it could do really well in getting a more mature crowd towards the console. The technology behind this thing is incredible, and I’m really hoping that software companies make good use of this product. Because this is entirely motion as opposed to an option, it only makes sense that any company choosing the Kinect for their next game or product is going to spend the time to do motion right in it, or will leave motion alone and just go to the classic controller option.

And honestly, that black and white choice for developers is what’s going to give this project a good chance for success, and hopefully give motion games a little bit better of a reputation.

Fare Thee Well, Television

As a lot of you probably know, I haven’t had a television or cable since I moved down to Estevan.  Yes, I do still watch a lot of television shows via alternate methods, but in recent months I’ve started to realize how obsolete the concept of “live TV” is in this day and age.  Yes, televisions themselves are still relevant and are only increasing in quality, but the live programming that we watch on there via cable or satellite is, for the most part, no longer relevant.  Let me explain.

In my mind, live TV died the day that the digital video recorder became commonplace.  Sure, we’ve been able to record live TV since the VCR, but the pure size and ease of DVRs is when we really broke free from the dependence of watching programs live.  VCRs had a six hour limit for recording, and you had to make sure you weren’t at the end of the tape, watching things fairly quickly, etc.  Once you get a hard drive in there, you could leave your house for a month, record every show you watch, and then watch them when you got back.  Best of all, all the programs were labeled, and you didn’t have to worry about rewinding and hunting specific shows down.  In short, television became convenient and allowed you to watch what you wanted when you wanted.

Once DVRs became popular, the next step was to move to the internet – specifically, networks actually allowing on-demand streaming of television shows, as well as larger sites like Hulu hosting for a large variety of networks.  Sure, there are some delays for when shows get released in relation to when they air live, but most days it only ends up being released within 24 hours of the initial broadcast.  Realistically, knowing that most people don’t watch shows live, that doesn’t seem like that bad of a delay to exchange with the convenience of watching the show anywhere you want.

And finally, my personal favorite, I’m a firm believer that the future of programming is starting right now in the form of Internet TV/Podcasting.  Just last week I finally found a good way to integrate video podcasts into Windows Media Center, and it works very well.  I now have a daily tech news show, a weekly tech show, a weekly cooking show, a weekly comedy show, and a couple of interesting shows that illustrate how there are plenty of things that you can do on internet TV that you simply can’t do with traditional media – specifically, audience interaction.

Am I saying that satellite/cable providers are useless now?  Well, no, at least not right now.  There are still good reasons to go cable, mainly for sports, select reality shows and some local news packages right now.  In short, I equate it to Sirius/XM – it’s not dead, it’s just that it has a select market that only a small percentage of people need to worry about.  What I’ve been recommending to people for a while (And have really started to push) is to build a Media Center to replace your DVD Player/DVR.  With a media center PC, you can get the best out of all the worlds for programming – you can watch TV live as well as record it, you can watch recorded and downloaded videos from places like iTunes, and you can get access to streamed programming from networks as well as internet TV site such as Revision3. Plus, you can normally build one of these machines for less than a thousand dollars, and you could even do games on it as well if you wanted (Games that work with a controller work best).

So, I encourage everyone to take a look at alternate options before going with cable/satellite again.  You’d be surprised what you can do, and how much you could be saving as well.