Microsoft Kinect: The AnandTech Review
by Brian Klug on December 9, 2010 3:20 PM ESTSetup and Calibration
The first time you connect and fire up your console (Xbox 360 or Xbox 360 S), you get to go through the setup wizard. If you don’t have Xbox Live, you’re told to sign up for a trial period and that you really should get it so you can download necessary updates. Actually, even before the trial wizard pops up, you’re prompted to install a necessary update if you somehow don’t have the tweaked Xbox 360 dashboard (NXE 2.0?).
After that, you’re told to position the sensor appropriately, check background sound, calibrate the array microphone, and then decide whether you want to use the Kinect microphone for Xbox Live party chat. The first time I ran through this wizard, it complained to me that the room was too loud - in complete silence. I think that me snapping photos was loud enough to trigger it, but they’re not messing around with wanting you to be quiet during the calibration routine. Moreover, this is important so the smart microphone system can build a profile out for the room, and probably cancel the game sounds themselves. On my 5.1 system each channel played a tone twice.
The setting to pay attention here is whether or not you truly want your Kinect to be the party chat device. Turn it on, and you’ll default to using this microphone array in online matches instead of an earpiece which you can easily mute - in fact, this is really the only inconvenience. If you turn this off, you’ll also find that later on you can’t use Kinect Video chat - more on that later. The setup tutorial also tilts the sensor appropriately depending on whether you’ve put the sensor on top or below of the display.
After the wizard completes, you’re left thinking that it’s finished. Instead, it starts a training tutorial that tells you to move all your furniture, remove any extraneous friends from the field of view of the Kinect, and walks you through interaction. What’s unnerving about this tutorial is that it requires the controller - that just doesn’t seem right. It makes even less sense given the first setup wizard’s insistence that you put down the controller, even showing a no-controller symbol if you try and mash buttons. But it walks you through the basic interactions which I’ll summarize in a second. If you’re dying to see every step of setup, they’re in the gallery below.
The Kinect tuner essentially lets you run the audio calibration, tilt, and room calibration again. There’s a card which ships with Kinect Adventures (and you can purchase online, seriously) that has a happy face.
The tuner takes requires you to hold the calibration smiley card in a variety of positions that line it up with on-screen sunglasses. This calibration routine requires lots of ambient light as it seems to use both the depth and color cameras.
The final (optional) Kinect training is auto-login facial recognition. It’s a pretty cool concept - step in front of the Xbox in a Kinect enabled game or situation, and you’re automatically signed in under the appropriate gamertag.
The facial recognition training requires you to stand in a variety of different places throughout the room and match a pose. It’s a bit confusing that facial recognition requires hand gestures, but I’m guessing this is just to keep the ADD sensibilities appeased. You walk around, turn slightly, and stand in the appropriate place until told to move. Kinect basically needs to build a 3D profile of your face since its facial recognition algorithm uses both depth and color cameras to build your profile.
In practice I found auto login to work without fuss almost all of the time. Step into the field of view of the sensor, and you’ll get a recognizing prompt to the left of the depth camera image, and if successful a “welcome back, [gamertag]” message. I only had auto login fail once or twice when the room was very dark, and once when I moved the Kinect to a completely different location before running the tuner again.
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brundleflyguy - Friday, December 10, 2010 - link
"My guess is, if you are using a projector, you should put Kinect in front of you... if there is enough cable length."Yeah, I know. :)
My current set up is:
Wall<--4ft-->WiiBar<---6ft--->Me<---4ft--->Wii<--1ft-->Projector.
I can't get much closer to the wall or my shadow blocks the projected image. My question is: If I replace the WiiBar and the Wii with the Kinect and XBox360 (respectively) would that work? Or would I be too close/far away from some component? I know I can get an active USB cable to reach from the XBox360 to the Kinect.
JonathanYoung - Friday, December 10, 2010 - link
I think I used up my quota for seeing the word "itself" in an article.brshoemak - Friday, December 10, 2010 - link
Totally OT, but I loved the pictures last.fm showed for Xzibit - we just need active content to rotate 'yo dawg' taglines over it.GTVic - Friday, December 10, 2010 - link
I shall now title all of my comments with my name.melgross - Friday, December 10, 2010 - link
I don't have an XBox and aren't interested in getting one, so I'm no XBox fanboy. But, for all those complaining about various problems, just remember that this is a 1st generation product. It's the first device of its type in the consumer market. It's got its problems, but it does a credible job. A year or two from now, either MS, or Sony, or Nintendo, or Apple will come out with a new one that works much better, as always happens. But this seems pretty good for what it is in this timespace.Portablenuke - Friday, December 10, 2010 - link
Forget the Kinect, where can I get wafer mask coasters!?trip1ex - Friday, December 10, 2010 - link
I think the reviewer was a little too generous.First he's too hung up on the fact you can cheat on the Wii. SEems to be his basis for liking Kinect.
I don't think he called out Kinect enough on its drawbacks or the quality of some of the games.
See what the reviewer failed to mention is how sloppy many of the games are.
Take Kinect Adventures.
YOu have to jump way before you think you have to in one of the games. Pretty darn laggy. And there's jaggedy jumping animation as well.
Waving your arms to hit balls in another game was just so un precise. You basically swing in the ballpark and you connect. It doesn't leave you with a solid precise feeling. You don't feel connected to what is happening on the screen. There's something missing between your actions and what happens on the screen.
It's the same with plugging wiki-leaks in Kinect Adventures. You see where the leak is and even though KInect tracks your hand/arm fairly accurately you're still just reaching in the dark to plug the Wiki-leak. There is no preciseness or feedback to the gameplay. OH this leak is down here somewhere I will just move my hand down there in the general vicinity until the screen shows the hole is plugged.
The only thing I found Kinect did really well in Kinect Adventures was track me as I moved left and right to avoid obstacles in the "moving platform" game. That was the only solid part.
Overall I found the KA and the integration of Kinect into the dashboard along with the voice commands and hand gestures to be pretty sloppy. I think that after the xmas gold rush wears off this device is going to die out pretty quickly unless someone comes out with a killer app.
DanaG - Friday, December 10, 2010 - link
Is there any way to put the XBox 360 in a sort of "kiosk" mode, where the only way to exit games would be to push a button somewhere? I see online that there's some "kiosk mode" disk, but I have no idea what other features it would disable, and that kiosk mode is supposedly irreversible.DanaG - Friday, December 10, 2010 - link
I'd be interested to see how much of that latency is caused by the receiver and the TV. I've seen some TVs where even a computer mouse is laggy enough to notice even with game mode (that disabled itself every time you turned off the TV); I had to switch back from HDMI to VGA on that device.Please try connecting the 360's HDMI to a known low-latency monitor that can do 720 or 1080.
clasam - Saturday, December 11, 2010 - link
Could we get an update about the lag WITHOUT the Onkyo ? Thx!