Xbox One Kinect Is Awesome

Xbox One got one thing right at the reveal yesterday. The Kinect is awesome.

At Microsoft’s reveal event yesterday, one feature of the Xbox One gained an almost universally positive response. The Kinect, although mandatory for the Xbox One, is amazing.

Kinect used to be just some gimmick that Microsoft made for the Xbox 360 for motion controlled games, and it didn’t do very well in general. Most of the games that used it were terrible, and nobody really saw the need to own one because it usually just sat there reminding us of the money we wasted on a game peripheral we never used.

When the Kinect was integrated into the controls for the Xbox One, it had everyone’s attention. It isn’t just for certain games any more. Remember using your remote control Xbox 360 controller to turn the system on and off and navigate Xbox Live? Now you can do all of that just using the Xbox One Kinect.

The new Xbox One Kinect recognizes portions of your skeleton to give you more control than ever before. It can even paint a 3D monochrome version of you on the screen as you move around. It detects everything in front of it, so even a simple hand gesture can do more than ever before. The lag from the old model is all but gone, and it even detects your heart rate.

Of course on the heart rate thing, it’s a little hard to believe.

The Xbox One Kinect also responds to voice commands, so technically you may not have to lift a finger to surf the net with it. If anything, the voice recognition capabilities should give mobile phone companies something to strive for, so we won’t have to scream into our phones to tell some automated system what we want any more just because someone in our home won’t shut up or turn the TV down.

Now just imagine the gaming implications of all of this and the Kinect alone might sell the Xbox One. Quite a reversal for the device since the last outing, wouldn’t you say?

What do you think of the Xbox One Kinect? Is it worth buying the console for?