Microsoft, as you will know unless you’ve been living under a rather large rock recently, has released their motion controlling platform, Kinect. Kinect has done quite well as a gaming device, though whether or not it will be consigned to the novelty status of the Wii — bought by millions, played with for a month and rarely touched again — will probably depend on whether or not some decent games follow the collection of novelty launch titles. But Kinect’s gaming prowess is not what I’m typing about.
Not really.
The point of this post is to talk about the unbelievably cool things that are being done with Kinect away from the Xbox 360. Not surprisingly, Kinect is being hacked left, right and centre. The things that are being done with Kinect are not things that the clever people messing with it couldn’t have done before, but by packing all the technological wonderfulness into Kinect that Microsoft have, and then mass producing it, they gave the aforementioned clever people a cheap way of working with this kind of technology.
I had originally planned to list a few of my favourite hacks here, but there are so many and they are all cool, so I’ll just link to this website, and you can go take a look-see for yourself.
Microsoft had originally stated that they would go after people who hacked Kinect. Firstly, this would have been an unbelievably wrong thing to do from a moral standpoint. They can make the argument that hacking an Xbox should not be allowed because it is attached to a service which is used by others, and it is unfair on other people using that service if your console allows you cheat. Really, they just want to stop people playing copied games, but that’s a different post. In the end, their decision to ban hacked Xbox’s from the Xbox Live service is fair; people can hack their Xbox, but they can’t use that console on Microsoft’s service.
To even consider the possibility of trying to stop people hacking Kinect is ridiculous! It is a piece of hardware that is meant to be used with an Xbox, but it doesn’t have to be. I would go so far as to say that Microsoft thinking that they might have had the right to stop people is ridiculous. Yes, Microsoft make Kinect, but if you don’t want people to use it how they want to use it, don’t sell it!
However, that is a moot point, because they didn’t. Microsoft kindly announced that they wholly support the hacking of Kinect. Perhaps after someone pointed out how stupid they were being. Now, I want to suggest they go a step further.
Rather than just kindly refraining from suing people who hack their property, why not make as much money as you can out of it? Release a ‘vanilla’ Kinect. Take away Kinect Adventures, any Xbox-specific gubbins and put it in a plain box without all the consumer necessary instructions for someone who’s never operated a microwave before, and drop the price to reflect the missing parts and sell it people who just want to make amazing things with it like they have. More people would be encouraged to do so, because it would be cheaper, and Microsoft would make more money because they are selling more!
Come on Microsoft, you know you want to.