Xbox 360’s USB Port Limiting Kinect From Reaching Full Potential

Kinect’s true potential is being limited by Xbox 360’s USB port. The Xbox 360 USB is based on the 2.0 standard and Blitz Games founder Phillip Oliver has said that developers are being limited by the slow data transfer speeds.

“The Kinect camera is quite a high res camera,” said Oliver talking to GamesIndustry.biz, “so we actually asked (Microsoft) that we have access to the higher res picture.

“But they can’t give the full resolution picture, at the full framerate, because of the USB 2.0 connection.

“It’s just the technicalities of the Xbox.”

According to Oliver, the full resolution picture would have come in handy for the studio’s next upcoming Kinect game Yoostar, which has the player acting out a selection of famous movie scenes.

But instead of scrapping the project because of technical limitations, Microsoft offered Blitz a solution.

“So what we said was, we just need to access a section, a piece of the image and bring that through in a higher resolution,” continued Oliver. “Effectively a digital zoom. Which they gave us. That’s an excellent feature.

“So now you don’t even have to get into frame yourself. The camera can select the right bit of the high res picture and zoom in itself.”

Oliver does expect Kinect to be a huge success though.

“I think it’s a genius idea,” he continued.

“I would say, because I think it to be true, that Kinect will be tremendously successful and it will show the future of what’s required next, which hopefully will be a console which is using the same principles as Kinect.”

via GamerZines