What Kinect Could Be, But Probably Won't

An opinion piece at CNN looks at Microsoft's Xbox Kinect, praising the system's capabilities not for gaming, but for what it does to the video viewing experience. "The idea of being able to ditch your table full of remote controls and just use your hands and voice to interact with the TV is compelling. It's much nicer than QWERTY keyboards, which are a terrible idea in the living room. It's also better than Wii-like remote controls, or even using an iPad or smartphone as your TV remote, a feature that cable companies are increasingly rolling out." The problem, as they see it, is Microsoft's inability to actually bring this into common usage for regular television viewing. "It seems like the company is tied too much to the Xbox's substantial gaming revenue to split the Xbox TV stuff off as a separate product — even though there's a huge population of non-gamers who probably have no interest in buying an Xbox." Perhaps this is something that can be addressed by others when the Kinect SDK is released.

Re:Explain to me...

[SilasMortimer]

I kind of like the idea. Particularly if I can specify what words are used for the commands.

Firstly, I would name my entertainment unit Telebot. The command to power on would, of course, be "entertain me." Thus, to turn on my entertainment unit, I would say:

"Telebot, entertain me!"

And simply changing the channel is boring. I could go two ways on this: The command could be "transform to [number]" or "adjust your frequencies to channel [number]". Mute would have to be activated with "Telebot, silence!" and deactivated with "Telebot, you may proceed." All successful commands would be acknowledged with the OSD saying "Yes, Supreme Overlord" and unsuccessful commands would elicit "Does not compute", after which it would be properly contrite following some suitable punishment I have not thought up yet. The only trouble would be making it respond to an imperious tone and ignore all others.

Man, I'd actually start watching TV again if I could do that.

voice control is a bad idea

[tomhudson]

"The idea of being able to ditch your table full of remote controls and just use your hands and voice to interact with the TV is compelling."

voice

You'll never be able to watch that Top Gun disk ...
"EJECT EJECT EJECT" ... bzzzt disk ejected.

And you'll never be able to finish Casablanca:
"Play it again" ... player loops back to scene 1

And no police action dramas.
"Police! Stop!" click ..

And Ah-nold will just endlessly loop ...
"I'll be back" loops to previous scene

And forget about "Spaceballs"
"password is 1 2 3 4 5" ... wrong password - device locked!

And all those westerns ...
Hold it right there ... paused

And all your porn will be reduced to 20 seconds
Faster! .. 2x
Faster! .. 4x
Faster! .. 8x
Faster! .. 16x
Faster! .. 32x
Faster! .. 64x .
Faster! .. plaid .