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!

Share the Future

Five years ago this past Monday, three former employees of early PayPal — Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim — founded the ever-pervasive video-sharing platform. The site now boasts over 2 billion views per day or, as YouTube’s blog puts it,

“…nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major U.S. television networks combined.”

Click on this image to see a larger, more readable version of this very informative graphic about YouTube's first five years of existence.

As the story goes,  Hurley and Chen conceived YouTube after having trouble sharing videos shot at a dinner party at Chen’s San Francisco apartment. The mission was simple:

“…give anyone a place to easily upload their videos and share them with the world. Whether you were an aspiring filmmaker, a politician, a proud parent, or someone who just wanted to connect with something bigger, YouTube became the place where you could broadcast yourself.”

Aligned with this mission, YouTube’s celebratory channel prompts users to upload videos and share their YouTube stories, some of which are chosen for the channel’s video wall. Also home to an interactive timeline of some of the most important moments and memes in YouTube history, the channel also hosts big names like Conan O’Brien, Vint Cerf and Katie Couric, who curate playlists that showcase their favorite videos.

YouTube’s Rise: Striking Fear into the Hearts of TV Networks

A few fun facts:

• Users upload over a day’s worth of video to YouTube every minute;
• YouTube broadcasts live sports to over 200 countries;
• and the average user spends about 15 minutes per day on the site.

Needless to say, YouTube’s staggering success is changing the way TV networks are thinking about both their audiences and themselves. As Wired‘s Eliot Van Buskirk writes, YouTube’s doubling the viewership of the United States’ three major networks

“…hints at an eventual tipping point when the internet could become the world’s dominant video delivery system, Mark Cuban’s predictions aside.”

YouTube, however, may be more of an ally than a foe for TV networks. As Van Buskirk astutely observes, unlike their counterparts in the music industry, TV networks not only own their content, but they also have the leveraging power of having similar, successful projects already in play — e.g., Hulu (ABC and NBC) and CBS.com. This will certainly work in their favor as they make the plunge of officially posting their old content on YouTube.

More interestingly, Van Buskirk notes, YouTube is changing our viewing behavior, and our computer content viewing habits will inevitably alter how we consume TV programming.  The trend toward bringing the internet to TV is already well in motion:

• YouTube reaches TV-using gamers through Nintendo Wii‘s and Sony PlayStation‘s ability to connect to the internet;
• set-top boxes like D-Link‘s Boxee Box are making it possible to stream high-definition and even 3-D YouTube videos onto a TV;
• and Google will soon unveil its next-gen set-top box in partnership with DishNetwork, Intel and/or Sony.

TV networks aside, I think the real losers in this trend may ultimately be TV manufacturers. Recently, I personally opted to buy a large computer screen instead of a TV, given how little I actually consume TV programming (, which was the case even before YouTube,) and the wide-spread availability of those TV shows I do want to watch online. It’s no wonder, then, that companies like Samsung are running to novel technologies like 3-D to reinvent their businesses.

A New Creative Class: New Media Content Entrepreneurs

As YouTube’s director of strategic partnerships Kevin Yen recently noted in his article on CNet, new media like YouTube are giving rise to a growing creative class. While few in the mainstream know of them, new media’s emerging creative class often command weekly audiences that dwarf network television’s biggest shows on a good night, Yen observes.

For example, Phil DeFranco, who runs the seventh most popular channel on YouTube, “has beaten ‘Larry King Live‘ and ‘The O’Reilly Factor‘ in daily audience,” according to a recent article in Fast Company.

Of this creative class ilk, Yen writes:

“They are not only the actors and stars of their show, but they are the producers, the copy editors, and cinematographers; they work to market themselves, close advertising deals, and sometimes employ a team to support and promote them.”

Online video content companies like Machinima, Next New Networks, and Demand Media collectively represent billions and billions of views, which they have converted into dollars (primarily from advertising). Nascent rental services for YouTube content only supplement an already robust toolkit for online content creators to turn their projects in money-making enterprises.

That said, YouTube undeniably is still home to a plethora of crap. Among that crap is the first YouTube video ever posted, “Me at the zoo” (see below), which features founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo. The nineteen seconds you’ll spend watching it is probably nineteen seconds too long. Thanks, YouTube, and happy birthday!

Thanks for reading! I hope to read your thoughts and concerns on YouTube, the future of TV networks & manufacturers, and new media’s emerging creative class in the comment section below. If you’d like to contact me directly, you can reach me through my newly added contact form.

Share the Future