First Image from Kinect 2 Leak onto the Web

A post on Eurogamer today offers up the above image, supposedly provided by one DaE, who you may remember as the guy who somehow managed to get his hands on (and try to sell) a next-gen Xbox dev kit.

As you can see in the image, if it’s legit, the detection capabilities seem vastly improved over the current technology, to the point where a person’s fingers can be detected even when held against the body. That’s pretty good. Whether or not that will result in better use of the Kinect in games in the future remains to be seen (I’m not betting it will).

As far as whether or not the image itself is to be believed, Eurogamer continues to attest to the dev kit’s authenticity, confirmed through sources who would know, they say. As such, the image is coming from someone who’s had the goods before.

Potentially interesting. The main issue with the Kinect now is that, quite simply, it doesn’t do what it says it can do. And that’s a big problem considering that video games tend to rely on pretty precise input. If the Kinect 2 can step up that performance to the point where the input problems are significantly reduced (or, perhaps, gone entirely) then we’re talking something pretty great.

On the flip side, who cares about motion control anymore? Nintendo, the people who basically started the fad with the Wii a few years ago, are betting on touchscreen gameplay now, with motion controls coming in a distant second in terms of what they’re showing off with the Wii U. We don’t hear much about the PlayStation Move anymore, and the Xbox’s Kinect interactivity is far more voice-recognition based for the next batch of releases. And that can be just as easily achieved (if not far more cheaply) by just sticking a microphone on the controller, Seaman style.

So do we care about motion control anymore? Is the fad over? Or will the Kinect 2 reignite the interest?

Via Eurogamer