The companion device, which was introduced yesterday at the Xbox One unveiling at Microsoft ‘s Redmond campus, is a blocky little bar with a small camera and highly-sensitive microphone that looks pretty much like the first-generation Kinect.
But inside, it’s a much different beast. Using a custom chip designed by Microsoft, a 1080p ultra-wide camera and an amazingly sensitive microphone, the new Kinect is a roughly ten-x improvement in terms of the amount of information it can process and the fidelity with which it can read what you – and those around you – are doing.
So what will the new Xbox One do with all of this new sensory horsepower? Sure, it will deliver pretty amazing new gaming experiences, but perhaps even more interesting is how it might reinvent how consumers navigate and find TV content.
I don’t say this lightly. Like some of those I have talked to in the TV space over the past year or so about how TV navigation and discovery, I’ve felt that while new TV interfaces like motion sensing and voice are pretty cool on the surface, traditional tactile remotes with straightforward grid guides continue to have amazing staying power because of their simplicity and ingrained consumer behavior.
But I believe the new Kinect, with its huge leap forward in sensory understanding, may start to crack the code to get consumers to finally navigate and discover content in entirely different ways.
So what are the reasons the Xbox One Kinect could change the way we change the channel?
Here are a few:
Fidelity of motion and sound-sensing
One thing that I’ve always felt hurt free-space motion sensing and voice-control in TV remotes is the possibility for error. Imagine scratching your face or talking to someone about how you were thinking about changing the channel and the sensor initiates an unwanted command.
Pretty annoying right?
Well, the Kinect sensor will read your body language, the direction of your eyes and isolate authorized voices among hundreds of other possible indicators to really know if it really should be changing the channel or suggest a show. And unlike basic motion or voice sensors in isolation, the powerful combination of both with the Kinect’s powerful fidelity of understanding will help the it make huge leaps in eliminating false commands.
Night-vision
One of the abilities of the new Kinect sensor has is to see the room with the lights completely off. While this may freak some privacy experts out, it is hugely helpful in TV navigation scenarios. I don’t know about you, but sometimes I watch a little late-night TV in bed with a sleeping spouse beside me, and its these situations where voice control would be undesireable and motion sensing would have been impossible to use in the past.
But the new Kinect, with its ability to see a room in complete darkness, will be able to read cues and intent accurately with the lights out (and most importantly, not wake up sleeping spouses).
Contextual Understanding
But perhaps the biggest difference may be the new Kinect’s ability to really “read a room”.
Big leaps forward in TV navigation have been held back, in my opinion, because TV sensory devices haven’t had the ability to understand the context of a given situations. Huge advancements in predictive navigation – such as your TV remote accurately suggesting a TV event or launching a show when you enter a room – were not realistically possible because navigation devices and guides could never read such things as your physical state, who is in the room with you, and other important contextual clues.
However the new Kinect might have enough sensory understanding to actually read a room’s given situation correctly – understanding whether it’s just you or you with your eight year old daughter, determining what you and your company’s interest levels may be, and so on – to provide contextually accurate recommendations and navigation commands
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