Kinecting the Dots: How Microsoft’s Kinect Could Be a Game-Changer
Microsoft’s Kinect (once known as ‘Project Natal‘) could be a game-changing platform, if marketers and developers can connect the dots (pardon the wordplay). Not only does it provide unique opportunities for gaming and other more traditional forms of entertainment, but it also has high potential to affect commercial areas as diverse as retail, customer loyalty programs, fitness and education–enabled by various forms of augmented reality and social gaming.
Will marketers and developers recognize the full potential of Kinect's functionalities?
What Kinect Does & What Makes it Unique
In an initial ‘Project Natal’ (Kinect) fact sheet released in May 2009, Microsoft describes what differentiates its functionality:
- Controller-free gaming and entertainment. “Project Natal” provides a whole new way to play — no controller required. It uses a sensor to track your body movement and recognize your face, even listen to your voice. If you know how to move your hands, shake your hips, or speak, you and your friends will be able to jump instantly into any “Project Natal” experience.
- Full-body play. “Project Natal” provides a new way to play where you use all parts of your body — head, hands, feet and torso. With controller-free gaming you don’t just control the superhero, you are the superhero. Full-body tracking allows the “Project Natal” sensor to capture every move, from head to toe, to give players a full-body gaming experience.
- Personalized play. “Project Natal” provides an in-game experience in which the player’s face and voice are recognized. Greet and speak to characters in the game, or simply step into view of the sensor to log into Xbox LIVE and connect with friends. Only “Project Natal” is smart enough to remember voices and faces. Fun has never been so personalized.
- Off-the-couch play. “Project Natal” provides gameplay that gets you off the couch, on your feet and in the fun. Each “Project Natal” experience is designed to get players moving, laughing, cheering and playing together. “Project Natal” makes social gaming off-the-couch fun.
- Easy-to-play fun. “Project Natal” makes sharing in the fun a snap. Talk or watch a movie in the same living room or on the other side of the world — no headset, no keyboard and no controllers required. It’s just you, your friends, your family and a whole new way to play.
Controller-free interaction already places Kinect a cut above Nintendo’s wildly popular Wii gaming system–and Sony’s soon-to-be released Move controller apparatus for Playstation 3.
Beyond not needing a controller, the platform’s ability to recognize a person’s entire body — face included — and voice creates a whole new level of identification between the user and her virtual persona. On top of recognizing you, it remembers you, allowing for easy recollection of checkpoints and check-ins (a hint of what’s to come in the article!).
Seeing the Kinections
Now that you know what it does, let’s consider some of its potential applications.
- Retail: Zugara’s webcam social shopper cracked the door open to the possibility of a camera-based virtual retail experience. Despite its efforts, however, its inability to gauge size and body type of the user makes the experience somewhat useless, in terms of how the item actually fits. With its ability to recognize all parts and angles of a person’s body and gauge depth perception, the Kinect platform kicks the door wide open not only to virtual experiences in clothing retail, but also to head-focused retail like cosmetics and glasses.
- Customer Loyalty Programs: Mark Cuban’s recent suggestion of ‘checking-in’ via facial recognition (by a company he recently purchased, of course) is a step in the right direction. Even separated from services like foursquare or gowalla, the notion of ‘checking in’ — particularly, by facial recognition — can dramatically impact how businesses run their customer loyalty programs. For small businesses, Kinect and Xbox 360 could provide a relatively inexpensive platform to deploy this type of model. But, using such a system would naturally depend on customers’ privacy thresholds for being recognized whenever they enter a store.
- Fitness: For Wii users, using motion-sensitive gaming is a foregone conclusion. For Kinect users, the experience will be that much better, largely due to enhanced sensitivity to users’ actual physical bodies, not a controller’s relative position to where it was moments before. This leads to my next point.
- Education: Training programs that require physical movement — e.g., sports training, physical therapies and some forms of art — could be greatly enabled by Kinect’s platform. Not only that–they could be social, and people could participate in programs ‘alongside’ friends and other users from around the world, allowing interactions among those who are learning in real-time.
While I briefly discuss some broad applications, there are certainly more, and I’d love to hear some of your ideas in the comments section! Enjoy this video demo of Kinect from CNN!
Steven,
Thanks for your comment on the Webcam Social Shopper. Though you might find the Webcam Social Shopper experience “useless”, Kinect will also not solve the problem of altering a digital asset (from an e-commerce asset database) in real-time to have clothing ‘fit’ on the individual. The Webcam Social Shopper is about the ‘at the rack’ moment so people can get a better sense of how a color might look on them, if they like a certain design, share a photo on Facebook, etc. We do have options for sizes in the application to allow for ’sizing’ of the digital assets, but with today’s technology – and especially one running off a standard consumer desktop – it’s not feasible to alter digital assets in real-time to conform to one’s body. And Kinect / Xbox 360 will not be able to do this either (despite what the initial marketing video showed awhile back.)
You’ll first start seeing this real-time ‘fit’ technology in a retail environment before you’ll see it on a gaming console or desktop PC. Mainly because a retail environment can house a kiosk based solution that can run maximum processing power to achieve the technical challenge involved with altering digital assets against a body in real-time. You can find numerous ‘concept’ videos out there showing this as a ‘reality’ but unfortunately, it’s still a few years off from living in retail and even further off from being practical in a home environment with average computing power on a PC or game console.
On a side note, though the technology is not ready yet, there are other uses for augmented reality shopping including AR video chat (a system of which we created called ZugSTAR) which allows people to show together in real-time from anywhere in the word. This again replicates that ‘at the rack’ moment so someone could get instant feedback from a friend or family member on their prospective purchase – but this time in a video chat picture-in-picture format. So while ‘fit’ gets figured out, it doesn’t mean augmented reality shopping has to wait.
Other than that, I enjoyed the blogpost! HUI (Human User Interface) via Kinect will be HUGE and redefine gaming and gestural interaction in the digital living room. As a gaming fanatic, I can’t wait for both this (and Move) as it’s the next evolution in the gaming experience.
Take care,
Matthew Szymczyk
Matt,
Thanks for following the blog, and I really do appreciate your thoughtful post.
That said, I apologize for my cavalier choice of words in my description of the Webcam Social Shopper. I certainly recognize and respect its value, all the hard work that went into conceiving and creating it, and the entrepreneurial spirit that’s driving innovation in way that I think is going to be very important. I’ve actually often mentioned Zugara’s Webcam Social Shopper both in conversation and in presentations as being one of the cutting edge leaders of augmented reality in retail and virtual social shopping.
Thanks, too, for correcting my misled assumption that Kinect could solve for the case of real-time alteration of digital assets, and for giving me an update on the state of technology from the eyes of someone at the cutting edge. As a follow up question — do you think that it would be possible to simulate a close-to-real-time shopping experience, allowing for manipulation of digital assets in recently recorded video? That is, a person records a brief clip of her moving around in front of a camera, and then shortly afterward is able to watch the clip with ‘fit’ clothing formed over her body. If possible, I think that type of experience would be extremely valuable.
As I think you and most others would agree, even more important than basic design and color is how an item actually fits–especially among women consumers. Oftentimes, especially among higher end fashion brands, the differentiator is in fit of clothing, not of the design itself (e.g., designer T-shirts). While I certainly have a respect for innovation the Webcam Social Shopper has brough to the table, my own intuition is that the ‘at-the-rack’ experience isn’t a service that’s going to be too high in demand; people can tell whether they like a design and color of a clothing item by looking at a picture of it. But, it’s just an intuition, and I could be wrong.
Separately, ZugSTAR sounds like a really cool technology too, and I’ve got to say that I’m extremely impressed with and am a huge fan of the work you guys are doing over at Zugara. I think that this technology might be particularly relevant to sunglasses/glasses companies, given the focus (most of the time) during video chatting on the face and the ‘fit’ issue, which I don’t think is insignificant.
I’m really glad you enjoyed the post, Matt, and thanks so much for taking the time to leave such a thoughtful response! I hope that, despite my careless description of the Webcam Social Shopper, you’ll continue to follow the blog and share your insights; I certainly appreciate them. I’m excited too about both the Kinect and Move, and the different applications that developers and marketers come up with!
Please do feel free to send me updates on the great work that Zugara’s doing, and I’d be happy to cover it, if relevant.
Rock on,
Steven
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