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Coming in just over a week, Kinect for Windows, Microsoft hopes, will create a firestorm of original ideas and concepts that will drive a whole new market for them. After all, uses for the Kinect even before this official version have been widespread in the PC market thanks to reverse engineered open source drivers. But with official support and a new eye that can see much closer and with higher resolution, could this new device change the computing landscape as we know it? Or will it be a fad that will come and go much like the trackball and the light pistol. I guess the question is whether the normal user will embrace the Kinect as a primary control mechanism over the mouse and keyboard or whether that is even the point.
We’ve all seen that movie Minority Report, where Tom Cruise is going through various screens of the interface using hand gestures. The “technology” was also featured extensively in the alien motherships of the ABC TV series V. But is that practical as a long term replacement? Is waving your hand in the air preferential to moving the mouse around a table? In some ways, I can see it. Not being tethered to the desk is certainly one appeal. You could literally control your Windows from halfway across the room with voice and gesture controls which would seem to make it far more comfortable. But will that get old? To me it would. But perhaps I’m not the best judge.
You see, I’ll admit when it comes to technology, I’m a bit of a fuddy duddy (meaning old fashioned). I prefer to stay with the familiar rather than jumping headfirst into the latest gadget. I usually wind up switching only when forced into it, and some of that time, I’ve certainly wondered why I didn’t switch before. Case in point, showing my age, was when I saw my first mouse on the original Macs. I watched a friend use it and all I could think of was how much of a pain in the butt it seemed to have to keep leaving the keyboard to move the pointer around. I couldn’t understand why anyone would want that. But when I got the Amiga, which had a similar mouse and interface, it took me a bit of a time to get used to it, but once I did, I wondered how I lived without it.
Of course, the Kinect for Windows isn’t just to bring a new interface controller to the operating system to make it feel more compatible with Xbox Live. It’s to create a ton of new tech possibilities that were prohibitively expensive before the Kinect came out. Surgeons using it in the operating room to avoid actually touching a keyboard, archaeologists using it to map objects, 3D modelers foaming at the mouth at the possibility of creating models quickly for much cheaper than a scanner would, and others. These uses are endless and what I AM looking forward to is seeing what comes out of the minds of the public on this one, things that we have not yet seen. As well as some fun things that we may not want to see (like the guy who used it to track his nipples).
What do you think? Am I being too hard on this? Would you use the Kinect in your day to day life while surfing the web or working?
