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Kudo Tsunoda, the creative director and face of Microsoft’s Xbox 360 add-on Kinect, reckons rival console the Wii is an “unfulfilled promise”.
Speaking at a special Microsoft Tea event at E310 last week, Tsunoda denied that Kinect is the natural successor to Nintendo’s motion-enabled console.
“There is a promise in the Wii that is very hard to deliver in any kind of controller-based stuff,” he said.
“Even their very first E3 demos that came out – and you’re playing tennis, and everybody’s up and you’re going like this and you’re playing tennis and it’s awesome, look at that!
“Anybody who watches those things getting played, you’re just sitting here doing your little thing like this [does small movements with wrist]. That’s how controller-based games are played.
“Nothing against the Wii, because I like playing the Wii, I like Wii games, and it’s a great system, but I do think there is some unfulfilled promise there.”
Kinect, properly unveiled during a pre-E310 performance by Cirque du Soleil, enables players to interact with their Xbox 360s using their bodies and voices, and even has face recognition technology.
Since the technology was first unveiled last year, when it was known as Project Natal, commentators have called it the natural successor to the Wii.
However, Tsunoda refuted the suggestion.
“I don’t really see Kinect so much as a successor to the Wii at all, because there’s just so much more that we can do with our technology. Obviously the full body tracking is so much different than tracking two points in your hands of a controller.
“Somebody says, well, hey, is it a successor to the Wii, or is it an evolution of the Wii? Not really. If all we did was the full body tracking, and we said, okay well, look, you can do stuff with your hands, but now you can do stuff with your full body…
“But really Kinect is so much more than that. You have the full body controls, the voice technology, the human recognition stuff. Not even just talking about the Wii, but where else can you do that in any medium? Really, there’s nothing that’s delivering that type of experience anywhere in the world.”
Kinect will be out in the UK in November. Pricing is yet to be confirmed.
Be sure to check out our Kinect report from E310 right here.
