Xbox One and Kinect: saving lives or just a bit creepy?

November 27th, 2013, 23:00 Posted By: wraggster

Someone telling you they can feel your heartbeat is a sweet, intimate act. Most of all when you’re with your lover; slightly less sweet when it’s your doctor, and not all that sweet really when it’s a bearded man screaming it through your letterbox in the night.With the release of the Xbox One, there’s a new category that’s possibly the least sweet of all – an inanimate object that tells you it can feel your heart beating via its frightening infrared camera. Previously, videogame hardware capable of seeing into your body had been limited to Nintendo’s follow-up to the Virtual Boy, 1997′s unpopular Endoscope & Watch. Now, with Kinect, Microsoft aren’t happy with just owning the living room, they want to stake a claim on the internal organs and blood of the people sat in it.On the surface this seems like a terrifying and unnerving violation of your privacy, partly because it unarguably is a terrifying and unnerving violation of your privacy. When asked whether they’d like a tiny robot with the ability to see in the dark and understand human speech to sit silently watching them like a cross between fictional serial killer Buffalo Bill, an actual serial killer, and that robot from The Black Hole, most people would respond “no”. Kinect is inherently a bit creepy. It could measure you for a suit without you knowing. In a pitch-black room, it could not only determine whether there was a murderer poised behind you with an axe, but also record how long it took you to die.It’s not all watching you while you sleep, though. Having Wall-E’s evil pervert brother peering over the top of your television listening to your heartbeat may seem intrusive now, but it could save lives in the future. Gaming is a stressful, intense pastime – defeating a boss in Dark Souls is the cardiovascular equivalent of lifting weights on an exercise bike in a sauna for an hour and then standing up really quickly -– and if Kinect detects excessive, heart-straining excitement, it could react and dynamically make a game less interesting, with the developers of Ryse reportedly already hard at work on this technology.

http://www.edge-online.com/features/...-a-bit-creepy/

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