After a long wait and weeks of promo, Kinect finally hit the stores both in India and the US US and 10,000 INR in India
I was grinning ear-to-ear when MS announced that Kinect would be an add-on to the Xbox 360 system and wouldn’t necessarily require purchasing a new console. However, what took my breath away was the fact that MS has designed Kinect not just for the Xbox but for the PC as well. Now this is a coup de grace. Netizens who frequent ted.com couldn’t have missed Pranav Mistry’s “Sixth sense” presentation. I couldn’t help but think that Kinect would take us all a step closer to it. Kinect opens up the doors for a new array of gesticulation-and-voice based programs on the PC that can completely overhaul our PC experience. You might be able to give your keyboard and mouse some rest and just be “interacting” – talking naturally with your computer with gesticulations pretty soon.
I am sure usability experts will now sit-up and take notice that they could soon be doing away with conventional menu bars and interaction elements and coming up with new patterns to make a computer adapt better to human gesticulations. All in all, I think human-computer-interaction is heading into a whole new phase of fun. Sit back and enjoy the ride.
It may, or it may not.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, not too many people are going to have kinect connected to their PCs, so as a mainstream technology for interacting with your computer, its a long way off.
For some store demonstrations or specialized applications, I would tend to agree with you.