With the Kinect beta in full swing and the advertising machine ramping up, worries over the Kinect's abilities continue to concern core gamers, primarily the ability for the device to pick up motion tracking on a 1:1 basis. However, Microsoft’s Kudo Tsunoda wants to make it very clear; the Kinect is as fast as hitting a button on a controller.
"We've done tests back at the office where we have a TV, flash a light on the screen and we'll have a controller, and have someone there hitting a button, and someone with Kinect clapping as soon as they see the light on the screen, and both things go just as fast as one another."
"We already have the 1:1 stuff working really well and the response time is just as fast as pushing a button or making a gesture,” he adds. Come November, gamers should hopefully experience 1:1 response time on the new device.
[Thanks to Xbox360 Achievements]
4 Comments
August 31, 2010
Measuring the combination of a person's reaction time to the flashing light PLUS the input latency of the button and/or Kinect is not a fair way to measure what the player experience would be with an input device.
In 99% of cases, what is important is the time lag between the player's _intention_ to press a button or move a joystick and the result appearing on-screen.
I don't wait for a light to flash to tell me when to move my camera or fire my gun. This sort of test would only measure the gameplay of "whack a mole" and not any type of modern game experience where the user is initiating actions and executing their own plans, not just responding to rote stimulus.
August 31, 2010
That is a fairly limited test. What I'd like to see is something like one of those matching games where you're expected to hit multiple buttons in sequence as they pop up on the screen, compare that to having to do multiple poses with the Kinect. I still worry that so many reviewers are noting "floaty" controls on some early game builds.
September 1, 2010
After playing some at trade shows, I don't think the issue is going to be so much about lag, but accuracy.
People are so used to buttons giving 100% reliable inputs, that even when a device like this drops to something like 95% accuracy, its really distressing for the player.
In my experience, the accuracy of detecting actions was way below that target.
However, the current round of software masks that very well, both the lag and the accuracy. None of the detections are particularly time-sensitive or critical.
September 2, 2010
Hasn’t anyone ever been to a dinner where everyone makes a speech? By the forth toast I am just pretending to clap. After I have worked all I day I don’t want to clap jump or bounce. The thing I don’t like is Microsoft’s campaign that seems to just write an obituary for the analogue controller. Why couldn’t the message be, we are adding something that is going to give you more choice. Real gamers wait outside before the store opens for a modern warfare. We aren’t soccer moms or kids who play cooking mama on the DSI. We have the wi and the grave yard of games that my sons have tired of. At e3 the golden eye beta was golden. Anyone who wanted to test it had to use a traditional controller. I know good food and just because McDonalds makes the most money doesn’t mean my favorite food has to become hamburger.