For Christmas in 2010 I caved in to my eldest’s demands for an Xbox with Kinect, after all I had seen the rumours online that one of the games being worked on was a fully fledged, lightsabre wielding, force crushing version of Star Wars, with that in mind I made my son make all sorts of promises about keeping his room tidy, and that we would see what Santa brings.
14 months later, I love it, I play it more than he does, even though Star Wars still hasn’t been launched.
Now the news breaks that a version of Kinect is coming for Windows PC’s, and despite a lack of hard information in the press releases (check out the BBC website here http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16836031) about what it will actually do and also it will cost twice as much as it’s Xbox older brother, I want one.
I like the idea of getting rid of my mouse and just sitting back and waving my hand at the screen, maybe I can even sit there and say “Computer, Twitter please” and it will automatically switch the explorer page to Twitter, “Computer, Twitter update” and then I can tweet. It all sounds very exciting.
For the Sci-Fi fans amongst you, do you remember the scene in Star Trek IV The Voyage Home, the crew of the Enterprise have travelled back in time to 1986 to collect some Humpback Whales to help save them from an alien probe in 2286, and Scotty is at a plastics firm showing them how to develop a technology that will help them dominate their market, he picks up the mouse and talks to the computer as if the mouse is a microphone?
Well it looks like those scriptwriters weren’t that far off reality 😉