Rare: Kinect Lag Is Not a Problem

The success of Microsoft's E3 presentation of Kinect was overshadowed by some of the gameplay demonstrations raising issues linked to the lag between the player's motion and its occurrence on screen. Nick Burton, the executive producer of technology and communications at Rare, one of the Microsoft-owned studios that are developing games designed with Kinect in mind, went on to assure players that the lag was not really an issue.

“Lag is not an issue,” he declared for Eurogamer. “As with any prototype stuff, of course it was in the past. That's to be expected. Where we're at now, not at all. Yes, we've done a lot [of] work to make sure it wasn't a problem, but when you've got something that's copying what you're doing you can't have a lot of lag.”

Burton also said that the lag was set at 150 ms for Kinect Sports, which seems acceptable. However, Digital Foundry pointed out in its analysis of Microsoft's motion controller that this number was not including the delays associated with the display. Reports from E3 stated that the lag was not apparent in all of the Kinect titles, making this a problem that developers could avoid, despite the hardware.

Rare's exec also wanted to assure the studio's fans that it was not focusing only on casual titles. The recent re-branding was meant to freshen up the developer's image and not to announce a permanent change of the target audience. Burton refused to reveal other Rare projects in development, but promised that Kinect was to be used in other types of games as well because of the wealth of data it took in.

“Kinect's not just about tracking - there's voice recognition, identity, so many things. It's more than the sum of its parts.” Rare is the developer behind titles like Donkey Kong Country, Perfect Dark, Viva Piñata, or Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts. Kinect Sports will be available at the launch of Microsoft's device, that is on the 4th of November, 2010.