Terry Lucy

Microsoft should use Kinect for business

Microsoft’s Kinect is a great motion control peripheral, which adds depth to gameplay, as well as creating new and exciting areas to explore within a game. We all know this. Microsoft knows this, but Microsoft needs to take Kinect out of the living room and into the office.

While doing some research for some upcoming interviews, I came across a feature for Kinect I had seen before, but hadn’t thought about much. In upcoming racer, Forza Motorsport 4, players will be able to use a feature called ‘Autovista’ to literally walk around a car, open the doors, sit in it and take in the features of the whole vehicle.

While this may be thing of passing interest to those that play the game, if I owned this kind of technology I would be stuffing it under the noses of car manufacturers all over the world, telling them that they should be using this to show off designs, concepts and even finished products to the board.

Moving away from vehicles, a feature like this could be used to great effect in other industries. I don’t understand why its been out so long, yet we haven’t seen Kinect expand into business. Either Microsoft is keeping its cards close to its chest (Ballmer has said in the past that PC support could come) or it is completely missing a trick with this. 

I hope it is the former. I would love to see what people outside of the industry can do with this, and I know I am not the only one.