Hike!

Where is it going?

No matter what you make of Kinect's current games line-up or its future potential, you can't argue the past 12 months have been anything but fascinating: watching developers create new concepts to fit a button-free body-tracking control system, with all the success and struggle that brings with it.

One studio that's been integral to Kinect so far is UK developer Rare, and its incubation director Nick Burton recently spoke to The Guardian about the perils, pitfalls and promise of Kinect, revealing how the studio started Kinect Sports as a simple technical trial, years before Kinect's codename of Project Natal:

We literally started with just the tracked skeletal feed, mapping that onto a wireframe stick man. We put the camera on the eyes so you could look down and see your own wireframe feet, which was weird.

Then, Matt South, the guy who was developing that, said, "I want something to interact with." So he put a sphere in there and it had physics on it so you could pat it around. And he thought, "hmmm, that's interesting, I'll put some gravity on it." So it falls to the ground and, ooh, we've got feet let's try kicking it. A very simple football prototype developed from that.

This sort of access is undoubtedly what helped Rare to create some of the most intuitive experiences we've seen on Kinect yet, but the studio isn't stopping there: Burton has plenty of ideas for where Kinect could go:

I truly see a world where everything is Kinect-enabled in some way, but it shouldn't be, "oh, here's the Kinect moment." But there are interactions where it just makes sense for the console to know what I'm doing. I was talking to someone about this yesterday – if I'm playing a shooter and I look down for a second at the joypad because I've forgotten the controls, why doesn't the game pause?

Where do you think Kinect will go in the coming years?