Basically, it’s a chat room. This sentence is where I’d usually add that it’s also this, that, and the other thing, but, well, it’s not. It’s just a chat room.
It has some features, of course. There are a bunch of different environments to swap around, including a talk-show set, a cratered planet surface, and a fairytale forest. Each stage presents a very limited range of (barely-)interactivity via an “Emote” option, which – depending on the venue – might trigger a laser show, a cascade of streamers and ribbons, or a deployment of flying, screeching gnomes in eggshells. That last one doesn’t really make much sense at the time, either.
The big deal about Avatar Kinect, however, is the introduction of facial expression recognition. When you talk, smile, laugh, frown, nod your head, or whatever else, your onscreen Avatar does likewise. That’s the theory, anyway. Far too much of the time to be anything like realistic, my Avatar appeared to be screaming. Maybe it was because my Avatar’s arms kept clipping, raging kraken-like, through my Avatar’s head. I’m reasonably confident this was not actually happening in real life, because I was there and because I’ve not yet mastered the dark arts.
To be entirely fair, though, the face stuff does work well enough at times (I suspect dim lighting might have been at fault here), but the guys over at Fun Labs HQ really need to sort out some of the occasionally pretty terrifying body jitter. This is supposed to be a chat room, not an exorcism chamber.
Which brings me around, quite conveniently, to an important question – what exactly is the point? I mean, it’s kind of a nice concept, but there’s just not much going on in here to make this anything more than a very brief distraction. Perhaps if it included more customisation options or meaningful interactivity, but you’re all stuck there sitting in chairs and making stupid faces at one another. We already invented that, it’s called meeting for coffee in real life.
Microsoft’s also been making a bit of noise about using Avatar Kinect in business conference calls, although I can’t imagine why this is an improvement over regular telephones or webcams. If anything, looking at Avatars dressed in Halo armour might somewhat undermine the professional gravity of a corporate budget discussion.
The app does support recording sessions (up to five minutes) and uploading to the Kinect Share website, so I guess it could be used as a sort of alternative to podcasts, but given its very limited scope, probably not.
More than anything then, I suppose this is really just a demo for the facial expression recognition tech, marketed as a “new social entertainment experience” because that makes it sound nice.
At least it’s free.
Avatar Kinect review << Comments and views
Loading ...
