Kinect Might Be Used to Deliver Full Body Avatars, Social Space

The Kinect motion tracking system that Microsoft launched in early November for the Xbox 360 home console has performed better than the company initially thought and has managed to sell more than 8 million units during the crucial Christmas shopping season.

And now Microsoft, in addition to working with developers on delivering more games that use Kinect, is also interested in making it more powerful, possibly usable to scan a user’s body and deliver full avatars, detailed and ready to be played in an array of game universe, creating a better link with the experience than an avatar that was created by someone else.

Craig Mundie, who is the chief research and strategy officer working for Microsoft, has stated, “There’s no reason that we couldn’t do that in real time by feeding the information that we get from a Kinect sensor, including its audio input and its 3D modelling spatial representation, and couple that to the body and the gesture recognition in order to create a full body avatar that has photorealistic features and full facial recognition.”

He added, “This is obviously still research work, so it’ll be some time before it shows up in products,” which probably means that Microsoft will wait for the Kinect to reach a wider audience before starting to deliver more features.

Kinect does not use any sort of physical controller and relies on a very capable camera and software mix to track the movements of the player and then translate them into input for video games, with the Harmonix-developed Dance Central being the stand out from the current crop.

If Kinect is truly used to deliver avatars that included a detailed view of the player's body, Microsoft might be also working on a virtual world where they can be initially used, but the company has not announced any official Xbox 360-based full body social space yet.