14 DAY TRIAL // Kudo Tsunoda, who is the creative director working on the Kinect motion tracking system from Microsoft, has stated that the motion technology that it is using could only be developed for a Microsoft gaming platform.
His remarks came at Gamescom as he was asked whether Kinect, which does not have any physical controller, was more interested in delivering an immersive experience than on delivering precision tracking, which Sony has marketed as a strong point of the Move solution for PlayStation 3.
Tsunoda said, “It’s not like we bring people working on Sony Move into the Microsoft offices and say, ‘Hey, wouldn’t you like to check out Kinect?’ And, ‘Let’s do some kind of precision test between Move and Kinect.”
He added, “At the end of the day it’s funny to me. Those people really haven’t played with any of the Kinect technology, and I just think that as people see something completely unique that we’re doing on Xbox, not only with the full-body gesture stuff, but with the voice and the human recognition system, those are things that really can’t be done on any other console, or in any other medium.”
The creative director believes that it's more important for Microsoft to focus on telling the public about the abilities of Kinect than on trying to see what separates it from the Sony's Move device and “slam” the opposition.
Microsoft has recently confirmed that Kinect will not be able to recognize objects on launch, with the functionality set to be added later via a patch, and that the device will only recognize vocal commands given in three languages.
Kinect is set to be launched on November 4 in North America, with two bundles coming on the same date, one featuring a Xbox 360 with a hard drive of 250 GB, for 399 dollars, and another offering a console with 4 GB flash memory, for the price of 299 dollars.