I’d say I’m a pretty optimistic person when it comes to pieces of hardware I own and their longevity. Even when the companies have gone out of business, been sold off or just don’t care anymore I’m still there trying to use the hardware as much as possible. Just as an example, I was an early adapter to the Ouya, which was suppose to be the next big thing in affordable gaming. The system was good for some games, but mostly emulators and the development of games slowed down to an almost complete halt. I tried my best to keep putting up videos I captured and made mention in posts that I played a game on the Ouya, but my voice wasn’t enough. The same thing happened to the Kinect and Kinect 2.0. In the case of the Kinect I used it to give voice commands and play games. The hand controls were a little on the odd side, but I found the use of the voice commands and full body motion controls enough. When I was given the Xbox One on release day, it came with a Kinect 2.0 and I decided to take full advantage of it.

When setting up my Xbox One, I made sure to include all the voice commands I could and set up my speakers so that I could hear media at a certain volume and still give commands. Every time I was able to go to the voice command app, I would. I saw so much potential in the Kinct 2.0 that I felt it was my job as an Xbox One owner to use it as much as I could. There weren’t that many games that used the Kinect, but with the release of all the Marvel movies I always told people that an Iron Man game would do great.

I didn’t want a first person shooter where you just held you hands out and weapons fired automatically. I wanted some kind of open world aspect, where you would use both the controller and your hands. You could go out and do missions using the controller to fight and walk around, but you would also pick up clues and upgrade your armor with J.A.R.V.I.S. in lab. It was this time in the lab where the Kinect would come into play. You would stand in front of your screen and pick a part you wanted to update. You could grab an arm or leg and use your hands to rotate it so that you could grab an actual upgrade piece and manually insert it into the armor. Say you need some more boost, just grab the bottom half of your armor, use your hands to spread the armor apart and locate the boost section. Then you would grab your upgrade and insert into a given slot. Once you did the upgrade, you would pull your hands together and the armor would go back to normal. If there was other upgrades to do then they would be done, but if not you would give a voice command to J.A.R.V.I.S. There could be preset commands and you could say a variation of “Xbox select”, like “OK J.A.R.V.I.S.” and at that moment some pre-programmed commands could show on the side of the screen. You could tell the system to look at another piece of armor or clue, or just say “build it” and J.A.R.V.I.S. would build your armor with the upgrades you did. Essentially you were building the blue prints with your hand motions and once complete the system will make what you made.

This may sound like something that’s so simple that you don’t know why it hasn’t already been done, and I agree. The Kinect 2.0 is a valuable piece of hardware that is a technological break through and the development of software for it shouldn’t stop. Make the programming a little more open source and user friendly and get some classes for kids or adults to learn how to program it. There are those classes for kids to learn coding, which they implemented Minecraft in, and there should be no reason why children couldn’t also get a really easy version of the source information. I believe if Microsoft and Marvel teamed up and made this game and gave classes, then the Kinect could become something people wanted to buy again.