Rare: ‘Kinect will go beyond sports & family games’

September 29th, 2010, 22:15 Posted By: wraggster

Kinect’s launch line-up provides no foretoken to the wild ideas that the peripheral will provide in the future, a tech executive at Rare believes.
Nick Burton admitted that Kinect’s software launch line-up has an understandable air of predictability – with its sports and family titles – but insisted the tech had too much potential for it not to summon bold ideas from developers.
“With the launch of Kinect it was obvious to make the sort of heart-on-sleeve titles. Sports, family games, and so on,” he told Develop.
“But six months after the obvious games are done, that’s when the crazy ideas will come through.
“I think now we’re just waiting to see what people are hooked by, what they’re amazed by. We’re waiting for people to have that ‘holy shit’ moment. Even people that are tech savvy, we’re waiting for them to go ‘how the hell does that work?’”

Turning the subject to Rare itself, Burton suggested the studio was raring to get the green light on some of its own Kinect ideas.
“Just because we’re working on a sports title doesn’t mean that we don’t already have really bonkers ideas waiting to be worked on,” he said.
Burton insisted that the motion-tracking feature of Kinect was “the tip of the iceberg”.
“It can track twenty-odd points of a person’s body, but then you’ve got the depth information, the colour information, the audio stream – you put all these together and there are so many possibilities,” he said.
“The example I always use is working out who’s speaking in a room. Kinect has an array microphone – which works out where noises are coming from quite easily. But also, using the depth, colour and tracking information, Kinect can work out the size and appearance of who’s speaking, and suddenly it can mark a certain voice to a single person.
“That’s a few lines of code.
“It’s pretty exciting to think about the possibilities in joining all this tech together; figuring out what you can do.
“And I suppose what’s key is that these ideas, these techniques, will over time become easier for developers to implement.”

http://www.develop-online.net/news/3...s-family-games

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