After a lifetime of not owning a video game console, I finally bought one over the weekend, it arrived today. It is the Xbox 360 with Kinect. If you haven't heard of Kinect yet, you will. It is a new way of playing games - without any accessories- meaning completely hands-free. There's a video/audio sensor (and a camera) that captures your body movements (head, hands, arms, legs, feet, body) in realtime and feeds that information into the game almost instantly. You are a fulltime participant in the game, you're no longer passively moving something or someone via a joystick or the like; you are in fact that something/someone. I was pretty sure I was going to be blown away by it when I ordered it, but that would be understating the fact, by a mile! Microsoft really put a lot of thought and testing into this product; it is easy to use and most importantly (since this is a game console), fun! And not your 'regular' kind of fun... it's exhaustively fun. I was almost out of breath after just a few minutes of this. The reason is that you need to move your body to move the avatars on the screen; and we're not talking about small movements like raising arms or something. But instead, you're jumping and kicking and swinging huge arcs in the air, just like in real life.
The only thing I worry about this technology is that one will get literally too tired from it too quickly. But then that really depends on the game, so it'll be exciting to see what'll come out this year. Maybe there can be education games like 'exploring the tide pool' or climb Mt. Everest. Wouldn't that be simply awesome? There is no doubt in my mind that this new technology is going to take the world by storm. It's truly exciting times that we live in.
Now to something a little less technology-oriented. In fact, it involves pen and paper, so I guess you can say this is ancient technology. I'm talking about jotting down Evan's feeding times so we have an idea of how much he's eating and when. I'm sure other parents did something similar at one point or another. In fact, there are iphone apps that help you keep track of all sorts of baby activities - feeding, diaper change (wet vs you-know-what), milk pumping (left/right), sleep, etc. I downloaded some of these apps, but seriously, who's gonna flip on the iphone to check the diary every once in a while. It's nice to have the hand-written information taped up to the wall next to the clock. Now... if we had an ipad, that might be a different story. The increased screen real estate and convenience may make this kind of task easy to do digitally. We'll see once we get an ipad (or some other sort of tablet machine).
We were looking to get a Wii but looks like the Kinect is the way to go. Heath says they have a way to go so maybe we'll wait for the next generation. I like your idea of a game that's a mix b/w adventurous and educational.
ReplyDeleteWe thought about getting a Wii, too, but Evan's too young for any of that right now, so the Xbox was more for us (to stay in shape!). But I really like the idea of the technology, I think tons of really fun kids games will be created for this platform.
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