ELECTRICCHALK

I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet but Microsoft’s Kinect is really impressive, at least from the hype and reviews. I like the idea that MS have stripped away one of the main barriers most people face when getting to grips with console gaming; the controller. Nintendo made a big leap with the Wii but it still required a special. The Kinect is the games equivalent of the move from mouse-based interfaces and iPhone-style touch screen loveliness. “You are the controller”, as MS put it.

What’s really interesting, though is what happened within hours of the Kinect going on sale. See this article from the BBC’s Click programme site for what happened.

This is the interesting bit:

“Dana Blankenhorn, of ZDNet, said that Microsoft’s change of heart was down to two factors:

“Microsoft lawyers recognised that it has no legal case against Martin, who made no changes to the hardware [and] Microsoft marketers realised that the drivers might, in the end, be a gold mine for Microsoft.”"

Maybe they realised the excitement that was generated by the hacks of the Wii remote (See Johnny Lee’s TED presentation) could be replicated for the Kinect. It looks like it’s beginning to.

And all they had to do was not sue anybody.

No Kinects were harmed in the making of these hacks as the BBC article points out. Microsoft hasn’t lost anything by tacitly allowing this to happen. No one has developed a counterfeit device that will damage their sales and it may have created the next leap forward in interface design, guaranteeing a big pay day. If they’d taken the stereotypical corporate approach of litigating to protect their ideas it could have been counter productive for them.

It’s refreshing to see a radical change of approach from a big corporate player that combines their heavyweight R&D power with the agile, open source developer community. It would be really interesting to see this approach adopted elsewhere.

So, could Kinect be Microsoft’s iPod?

PS: Read Engadget’s article reporting on what happened when Oliver Kreylos linked 2 Kinects together

Image: Microsoft Kinect – Xbox 360 by Kamil Molendys – By-NC-ND