3227

If players find that stuff annoying, the games won’t sell as well. It’ll work itself out either way.

3228

Lets speak more abstractly about cameras and mics as input devices. Gestures and voice commands are easily prone to misinterpretation and therefore unreliable. Humans use super sophisticated computers (our brains) yet we misinterpret verbal commands and gestures every day. Aside from novelty or unique scenarios I don’t think those inputs are going to be worthwhile in the near future. When it comes to games, we like to have control. Where actions are unequivocally intended (push a button) and have a direct result (fire a gun). If a game uses unreliable inputs then it could lead to a ton of frustration. I thought the idea of commands to be a very useful feature in Siri for example but when it misinterprets about 25% of my words it renders the service useless and annoying.

3229

You’re saying these things suck due to poor implementation, rather than poor design. I agree. So many the kinect2 is better, and thus doesn’t suck? It’s possible, right?

My personal feeling is that living room based gestures won’t really “click” for game control until they’re as precise as Leap Motion, and kinect2 won’t do that. But I could be wrong.

3230

Not necessarily. The price differential may make it better for gamers who don’t care for bells and whistles. You can’t say that Sony hurt themselves until we see how the PS4 does against the XBox One. It may have been a very savy move on their part.

3231

The PS Eye sold fairly well in the PS2/3 eras, for those party games that can benefit from it. Not including it is smart, aside from the price it’s really useful ony for a handful of specialized games. Its mandatory presence would no doubt lead to the same terrible gimmicks as the Sixaxis motion control in the first PS3 games.

3232

I’m saying that if our human systems (brains/eyes/ears) are fallible in understanding gestures and commands within our small region of vocal accent and culture, then some gaming peripheral sure as hell won’t be able to interpret our intentions on a global scale.

3233

So then your argument is that voice recognition technology will never improve to a level where it’s truly useful?

Yeah, I’m gonna have to disagree with you on that one. We’re almost there already.

3234

Very much agree. Hell, I don’t think Kinect 1.0 is perfect but I would say it works 9 times out of 10 already for voice commands. It’s rare that it doesn’t work.

3235

I don’t know about “rare.” Kinect used to do all sorts of goofy things during Netflix viewing when people talked. No one said “Xbox pause” but that didn’t stop it from constantly pausing the movie. We finally just turned the damn thing off.

3236

It works well enough to justify the extra hundred dollars?

In any event, why do I need a Kinect for voice commands? Nobody ever told Microsoft about a headset I guess?

3237

If it really worked, it would be nice for dashboard and media navigation. If.

3238

I said it won’t happen “in the near future” and usefulness will be on a case by case basis. Even 9 out of 10 success rate can be really annoying.

3239

Ahh, that was in a previous post. I agree that 9 out of 10 is not sufficient. It needs to be good enough that failures are surprising.

3240

Remember that the PS3 comes with a headset. So…voice can be there.

Honestly, voice is a lot better than it was 5 years ago, but I’m not sure if it’s quite there yet. (I freely admit I use incorrect voice commands as a running gag when I write short fiction)

3241

I was the one who said 9 out of 10. I do find it annoying when it happens. But I also find it annoying in general when Swype doesn’t work like I want it to. Or when my iPad doesn’t recognize my touch input. Or when Pandora doesn’t recognize my thumbs down. But on the whole, I want all of those things.

Further, if voice commands work well on Kinect 1.0, I’m fully expecting that the success rate will be even higher with Kinect 2.0.

3242

In my experience it’s highly dependent on who the kinect is calibrated for. Me and my wife have very different voices and accents. We each have an account that’s calibrated for our voices. But her account doesn’t have Gold access so we use mine 99% of the time. And it always understands me just fine, but she has a really tough time being understood.

We’ve never had it stop or pause during a movie though. I guess we haven’t been watching any movies where “Xbox” or anything like it gets said.

3243

My wife and I both have MS Sync voice-regognition in our cars. Mine works fine, she can never get hers to completely understand her. Same with the Kinect, my oldest boy it understands fine, the younger boys whose voices haven’t changed yet struggle. Fair or not, that’s how I judge MS’s voice recognotion tech. Low voice, OK. High voice, nothing but trouble.

We’ve never had it stop or pause during a movie though. I guess we haven’t been watching any movies where “Xbox” or anything like it gets said.

Some days nothing, other days Hulu pauses for no damn good reason and I hear one of the boys yelling “XBOX PLAY” over and over in the living room.

3244

Rumors are floating that Microsoft is going to announce some certification process changes and an indie self-publishing plan.

It will be more like iTunes or PSN and allow developers to submit games for the Xbox Marketplace with a minimal check for ToS violations, really egregious bugs, and inappropriate content. Two week turnaround.

Unfortunately, there may also be a major restriction. Devs must go through the Windows 8 app store to self-publish.

We should have more later with a FP article.

3245

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Oh, wait … that wasn’t a joke?

3246

I think thats great.

What could be even better, would be to create a interface to browse apps (games) for tablets. Make so you can install these games from the app (this is a feature that Steam have already). Consoles are awkward and not very good at browsing, but that can be done easily ( for people 2 years old or more ) with a tablet.

You also need a minimum of features exposed to indie devs to let them make awesome games. Games like Braid or Fez, I don’t think would work without hardware acceleration. So you may need self-publishing + hardware acceleration.