We forget sometimes that video games are like supercomputer simulations, masterful demonstrations of technology used in the service of entertainment. So don’t be surprised that some of the best new technologies are being created in conjunction with games. Here’s GamesBeat’s perspective on the best new technologies at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), the big video game trade show held last week in Los Angeles.

1. Oculus VR showed off the latest prototype of its industry-buzz building Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset — featuring a hot-off-the-factory-line 1080p panel. “We’re now putting the flag in the ground. … It’s at least 1080p. That’s what we’re showing here,” Brendan Iribe, Oculus VR chief executive officer, told GamesBeat. “Most likely, this is what people are going to be experiencing.” The unit featured a significantly better picture than the developer model that shipped to the Rift’s Kickstarter backers. “We’re still optimizing the lenses. … There’s a whole number of things that we’re still looking at,” Iribe said. Regardless, a better image leads to a better effect. What Oculus demoed provided an exciting look into the future of immersive gaming experiences — and other simulated endeavors. – Eduardo Moutinho.

2. Sony’s PlayStation 4 is an impressive piece of hardware. It uses the same silicon cores from Advanced Micro Devices as Microsoft’s Xbox One console. But Sony focused all of its engineering efforts on making games look their best. Sony’s machine uses faster GDDR5 graphics-oriented random access memory. And because it has one operating system instead of three, it requires less memory for the box’s overhead operations. The graphics memory delivers 176 gigabytes per second of memory to the combined CPU/GPU chip, compared to 68 gigabytes for the Xbox One. Sony’s machine will likely be able to display 4K video and games once the higher resolution televisions and displays arrive. While Microsoft dedicated its console budget to entertainment and Kinect features, Sony went all in on games. That could be a winning formula in head-to-head comparisons. But it’s up to game developers to exploit Sony’s processing advantage. If they can’t make games that stand out from Microsoft’s, then the bet won’t pay off as well as expected. Of course, Sony can’t brag too much: The high-end PC will run circles around the PS 4. – Dean Takahashi

3.Microsoft’s new Kinect is a tech marvel that uses 3D depth sensors, microphones, and a high-definition camera to capture your body in motion. The new version for the Xbox One can detect up to six people at the same time instead of just two. The field of view is 60 percent wider, so you don’t have to stand ten feet away anymore. It can distinguish among your fingers, whether you are smiling or frowing, which way your limbs are turned, and even detect your heatbeat based on movements in your face. The system can recognize your voice and it will respond instantly if you say “Xbox on” by turning on the machine from a deep sleep. Kinect can recognize your face and automatically switch to your preferences when you pick up a controller. You can issue voice commands and it will respond instantly if you want to change the channel on your television or answer an incoming Skype call. It’s so good that Microsoft had to reassure people that it would not use Kinect to spy on people and that players have the option to turn it off if they wish. Kinect uses two dedicated silicon chips in the Xbox One to handle all of its processing needs, but it can tap the cloud as well. – Dean Takahashi

4. Microsoft’s cloud processing holds a lot of promise for the Xbox One. With cloud processing, the game console offloads non-urgent processing tasks to the web-connected data centers. This so-called cloud of processors can be much more powerful than the game console alone, performing tasks such as artificial intelligence or background rendering that aren’t as essential to the instantaneous twitch experience of games. That means that one day, Microsoft could simply upgrade its hardware for the Xbox One by upgrading the hardware in its data centers. The technology will be useful in Forza Motorsport 5, a racing game where artificial intelligence is used to create rival drivers for the computer-controlled cars that you race against. The so-called Drivatar captures your patterns as a driver and uploads them to the cloud. Once analyzed, the Drivatar delivers an AI driver that approximates the same kind of skilled driving that you demonstrate in your games. Dan Greenawalt, creative director at Turn Ten Studios, the maker of Forza, calls this the “death of AI.” We’re not so sure about that, but it makes sense to split some processing between Microsoft’s 300,000 servers and the Xbox One. In a demo, Microsoft showed that it could turn an asteroid belt with 40,000 asteroids rendered on a local machine to an asteroid belt with 500,000 asteroids using cloud processing. The danger of cloud processing is that you might lose your internet connection. But in that case, the technology should fail over to local processing without a hitch. – Dean Takahashi

5. Microsoft’s Xbox One game controller is a step above the last generation when it comes to immersive, tactile feedback. The company was able to physically test lots of models thanks to its rapid prototyping 3D printer technology. The new device has magnetic triggers for both index fingers. These triggers can give you different touch feedback. Older controllers would simply shake when you were shooting a gun. But the new controller sends different sensations. Microsoft hasn’t shown the tech working in games yet, but it showed off a half-dozen demos that make you feel things like the kick of a gun, the rumble of helicopter rotors, the squeal of brakes in ca race car, and even the beat of your very own heartbeat, which Kinect can detect. The device does’t have a “share button” or a touchpad like Sony’s controller. But it does have an infrared LED on the front of the controller that, when combined with Kinect, can clearly identify the person who is using the controller. As a result, you can easily jump in and out of games. This may not seem like much of an advantage on the surface, but it is an improvement to the overall experience of playing games that you’ll know for sure when you feel it in your hands. – Dean Takahashi

6. Microsoft Xbox Smartglass has moved forward as a “second screen” app that serves as a companion for your games. Smartglass is integrated directly into Xbox One so you can use a Microsoft smartphone or tablet to control or view features in your game. You can use Smartglass to start a game, set up and launch multiplayer, look at your achievements, and view the timeline. While watching a demo of Crytek’s Ryse: Son of Rome game, I saw that the timeline tells you what percent of a game’s level you have completed while you are playing it. You can view game play hints, status of friends, and see the stats of your friends and how they stack up against your own. Xbox Smartglass will match you based on your skill, your language, and your reputation. – Dean Takahashi

7. The Virtuix Omni is similar to devices like the Oculus Rift. It plans to deliver more immersive gameplay for players. The Omni, however, is all about movement. According to Simon Solotko, public relations representative for Virtuix, “The Omni is a natural interface for virtual reality that enables locomotion. It enables you to run, walk, or jump in virtual reality.”

GamesBeat experienced the Omni first hand, and the technology shows promise. Virtuix chief executive officer Jan Goetgeluk skillfully played through a Half-Life 2 demo, successfully navigating one of the levels from the first-person shooter. The entire setup consisted of an Omni, Oculus Rift, Microsoft Kinect (for body-tracking purposes), and a standard console gun controller. Players will have to wear special shoes and strap themselves to a belt harness that rests on a safety ring connected to the device. Then, they can walk or run in place by sliding around the Omni’s frictionless base.

While awkward for newcomers, Goetgeluk showed that one can get used to the process. The Omni is just another piece of tech poised to take our gaming experiences to new and exciting frontiers -Eduardo Moutinho.

8. Frostbite 3 is the core engine behind DICE’s Battlefield series. The division of Electronic Arts built a platform for creating high-end 3D games with the editing tools to create spectacular 3D imagery. Battlefield 4 will get the benefits of Frostbite 3, which includes destructible environments and ultra-realistic character animations. EA says that Frostbite 3 in Battlefield 4 will deliver scale and destruction, showing you how huge events such as explosions can be rendered against a sophisticated environment. It also features realistic character animation and immersive audio. EA has bragged about the synergies of its game engines before, but it was infamous for the failure of the Criterion RenderWare acquisition. EA bought Criterion in 2004 for $48 million to create games for the last generation of consoles. But developers hated it and the technology failed. Frank Gibeau, president of worldwide game studios at EA, said that the company once had 17 game engines to build its games. Now it is reusing Frostbite 3 and its Ignite sports game engine for all of its titles. Among the Frostbite 3 engine games: Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare, Command & Conquer, and Mirror’s Edge 2. – Dean Takahashi

9. The Dark Sorcerer short film is Quantic Dream’s latest attempt to create human faces so realistic that they cross the uncanny valley. That’s the aesthetic concept thatholds that the closer animated human faces approach reality, the more unnatural they seem. The video played at E3 is meant to suggests the level of photorealism that the PlayStation 4 console can achieve when it comes to rendering faces, particles, flames, and water drops. The animated face of the Dark Sorcerer is indeed just that — a 3D animation — even though it looks so real. At the moment, Quantic Dream has no plans to turn The Dark Sorcerer, acted by David Gant and directed by Quantic Dream’s David Cage, into a full game. While it seems like a serious demo at first, you’ll quickly see that the The Dark Sorcerer is a comedic spoof of both filmmaking and video game development. Earlier this year, Quantic Dream released a demo dubbed Kara that also demonstrated a new level of emotional realism in 3D-animated human facial expressions. – Dean Takahashi

10. Project Shield is Nvidia’s Hail Mary play to participate in the video game business. Shut out by the console makers when it came to graphics chips, Nvidia decided to build its own portable gaming device using its Tegra 4 mobile processor and the Google Android operating system. Going on sale later this month for $349, Shield can play Android games on a 5-inch high-resolution that is attached to a game controller. The device is aimed at hardcore gamers who want to play Android games on their living room TV, using an HDMI cable for connectivity. Shield will also enable gamers to play PC-based Steam games on the big-screen TV. It remains to be seen if the demand exists for Shield amid so many other devices. Ouya is a competitor bringing Android to the TV, and so are devices like Bluestacks GamePop and GameStick. Shield itself may not be the winning bet for Android in the living room, but you can bet that mobile will give the console makers a headache at some point, given the free or 99-cent pricing for most mobile games. – Dean Takahashi

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

LOS ANGELES — The folks at Microsoft must have been thinking about bigger targets like Comcast or Disney. Because when they weren’t looking, Sony came back and stole away the hearts of gamers at the 2013 Electronic Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles this week. Microsoft was the undisputed leader in gaming moving into a new generation of consoles, but Sony reminded everyone that we’ve got a real console war this time around.

Sony’s message was simple. In a 30-second commercial, it can simply say that its box is for gamers and is cheaper. Microsoft can argue that it has a better deal, but it might take a 30-minute infomercial to get that across.

Starting with its Xbox One reveal on May 21, Microsoft made some serious miscalculations. It took some controversial positions on consumer rights issues related to used games, privacy, and requiring an always-on Internet connection. It may have had good reasons to do so, but the publisher wasn’t prepared to talk about those reasons in the way that it should have. It also didn’t talk much about games. Instead, it showed how the Xbox One worked within a larger system that could manage all of your entertainment.

Gamers reacted negatively. And Sony seized the opportunity. Kaz Hirai, the chief executive of Sony, said that Sony’s focus this time around with its upcoming PlayStation 4 was on gamers. The company would target its box at them to get it established in the home, and then it would deliver its broader entertainment message to scoop up the mass market. Microsoft, by contrast, made architectural decisions that suggested it wanted to go for the mass market first.

Just before E3, Microsoft tried to defuse the consumer rights issues by announcing its somewhat complicated stance on used games — it would not charge fees for them, but publishers could, and it would limit a owner’s sharing rights through digital rights management.

At E3, it got worse. Microsoft’s Don Mattrick, head of the game business, went first and announced its price at a high $499 and showed off its games. Then Sony’s smackdown began. Jack Tretton, the chief of Sony’s game business in the U.S., got a roar of applause when he announced Sony would permit consumers to buy and sell used games without restrictions. (Nintendo articulated the same policy). And then came the second big blow: Sony would sell the machine at $399, a full $100 below Microsoft’s price.

“Sony is having a great show,” said Frank Gibeau, head of worldwide game studios at Electronic Arts.

Microsoft was reeling. While its box may be as capable as Sony’s, and its policies not that far apart from its Japanese archrival, perception is what matters. At E3, Microsoft made a safe, comfortable bet and took an arrogant stance toward consumers. It could recover from that, but it would take a huge amount of marketing dollars to do so. It would be better instead for Microsoft to retreat sooner, change its policies, and match Sony’s price.

You could make a comparison to the grocery business, where high-end grocers tout their services, quality, and ethical buying practices to try to compete with Walmart. But consumers flock to Walmart because of its lower prices. They don’t have the patience to listen to a complicated marketing pitch, especially when someone else is simply offering a cheaper deal.

Sony isn’t bundling a Kinect-like motion sensing system in its box like Microsoft is, leaving out a system that may be valued at $50 or more. Microsoft does have a camera, and it dedicated a considerable amount of the silicon in its box to Kinect and instant switching between applications. But it failed to show the value of that system at its press conference. Marc Whitten, chief product officer at Xbox, acknowledged that this was a mistake.

Sony is also charging for multiplayer this time around on its PlayStation Network, much like Microsoft does with Xbox Live. And Sony acknowledged it will permit game publishers to charge consumers fees for used game sales if they so wish. So the differences aren’t that big. But Sony is going to do all it can to push the winning message: Its box is for gamers, it favors consumer rights, and its box is cheaper.

Microsoft could spend a billion dollars arguing why that isn’t so, but it should simply match Sony on those points.

Some of that is easier said than done. Microsoft put three operating systems in its box so that it could enable gamers to multitask their games with Skype calls and TV services. But that takes memory away from the games. Sony did not do that with the PS4. Microsoft included Kinect as a fundamental part of its system and  took away some of the processing power away from games. That may not matter too much, as Sony and Microsoft share the same chip technologies from Advanced Micro Devices. Microsoft says it can also tap the cloud for processing power through what it calls “cloud processing.” That essentially makes up for any shortfall in the game console by offloading tasks to web-connected data centers.

The jury is out on whether that will work, but Sony has not articulated the same message, and it may help Microsoft equalize the hardware battle. But that argument is an exceedingly difficult one to convey, even to gamers.

“The hardware is essentially the same,” said Brian Fargo, the head of InXile Entertainment. “This is a war over business models.”

Because of the choices it made, Microsoft is now on the defensive. It can easily change its positions. And it should do so fast, or else it could undo all of the work it did in the Xbox 360 generation to show that it could truly be the favorite among gamers.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Stay on top of all our E3 2013 coverage here.

Microsoft showed off a colorful, community-based game called Project Spark that’s the Xbox One’s exclusive version of LittleBigPlanet at its pre-Electronic Entertainment Expo briefing this morning in Los Angeles.

Dave McCarthy of Microsoft Studios and designer Claude Jerome demonstrated how players can build worlds and alter gameplay on the fly. Using the Xbox One and Windows 8, players can share content with anyone on virtually any screen.

Project Spark features Kinect voice functionality, which enables players to speak commands — shaping and constructing mountains, rivers, moats, bridges, textures, and more. They can even set the specific time of day. Players use what looks like a magic paintbrush to alter the landscape in real time as they imagine colorful, lush worlds at “the touch of a button.”

This new world-builder also enables players to add in objects and assign them behaviors. Microsoft showed how a simple rock could become animate by manipulating its “brain.” It hopped around and followed the player, who transformed it into a Rock Fighter and ultimately a Rock Mech.

McCarthy and Jerome stormed the grassy battlefield, assisting each other in combat. The onscreen characters launched fireballs and even manipulated the ground so that one could ride around on a cliff of earth as if it were an ocean wave. They could decide which types of enemies would attack their base, such as flying goblins and trolls.

Microsoft encourages gamers to think of Project Spark as both a blank canvas for creation and storytelling and as a way to build on and “remix” existing user-made content. You can play and share together.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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You think your Lockitron and your Nest make that flophouse you call an apartment a smart home? Pshhhh, that ish is basic.

This new whole-home gesture recognition system, called WiSee, comes to us courtesy of a few awesome eggheads from the University of Washington, Seattle. It uses good ol’ WiFi to give you ultimate cosmic power through the magic of gestural control from any room in your house.

Get a load of this demo clip:

Using WiSee, you could complete any number of simple tasks just by putting your hands up in the air and waving them like you’re trying to get a computer to do something for you. “For example, using a swipe hand motion in-air, a user could control the music volume while showering, or change the song playing on a music system installed in the living room while cooking, or turn up the thermostat while in bed,” write its creators in an academic paper on WiSee.

The system requires no special wireless standard, can be implemented with normal hardware, can deal with motion interference and even “accidental” gestures not intended to trigger the system.

“As computing moves increasingly away from the desktop, there is a growing need for new ways to interact with computer interfaces,” reads the team’s paper on the system.

WiSee was made by Qifan Pu, Sidhant Gupta, Shyam Gollakota, and Shwetak Patel. To make WiSee, they used Doppler shift properties to monitor wave frequency changes as people move through an environment and the MIMO capabilities of 802.11n to home in on on gestures from a specific user.

Image credit: University of Washington

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

MOSCOW — After working for several years to give robots the ability to see and detect objects, the founders of St. Petersburg-based Oriense logically decided to bring their promising tech to humans.

Oriense started development last November and combines a Primesense sensor (similar to Microsoft’s Kinect camera) with its own software. This software scans what is being detected by the sensor and gives voice notifications about where objects are when objects are directly in someone’s path.

“This is about safety and helping the visually impaired,” Oriense co-founder Konstantin Zhukov told VentureBeat. “We think it will work best when someone uses both a walking stick and the sensor. But (as it gets more advanced), we think it could potentially replace a walking stick.”

The company only has a rather heavy prototype done at the moment, but the prototype does work well when paired with a walking stick. Two of the founders showed it off on stage at DEMO Europe and then showed it to me later the same day. Anyone who wants to use it straps the camera to his or her chest, holds a small computer in their hand, and plugs in an earbud in a single ear.

Oriense says this style of unit will first be on sale with a Primesense camera and one-pound computer in September.

But even as it launches the first kind of unit, the company is working on a second version that gets rid of the Primesense camera and uses its own camera sensor. Ideally, this camera will be lighter and less bulky than what you see in the top picture.

Zhukov told VentureBeat that this second unit should be available “in six months.” At first this unit will be available in Russia, but then Oriense plans to branch out to other parts of the world, including North America.

Oriense has raised $20,000 in pre-seed funding to date. Check out the short video to see the company’s prototype in action:

Disclosure: DEMO Europe paid for the airfare and hotel in Moscow so we could cover the event. Our coverage remains objective.

Microsoft’s announcement of its Xbox One video game console landed with a thud on Wall Street, where the company’s shares are falling this morning. Other reactions have focused on what Microsoft didn’t talk about (it’s saving a lot for E3 in June) and consumer rights issues that it didn’t fully address.

Unfortunately, stock traders are reacting to the partial information that Microsoft released yesterday, and they’re not inclined to care if Microsoft was keeping its powder dry until the official E3 press conference June 10.

Microsoft touted features such as the integration of Kinect motion and voice controls into the heart of the system and the addition of new entertainment services and Skype. It showed glimpses of games such as Call of Duty: Ghosts (with exclusive downloadable content), EA Sports titles, and Microsoft’s own Quantum Break, promising they would look awesome. It touted clever hardware innovations such as cloud processing, which uses data centers to complement the processing power inside the machine. It also said it would integrate SmartGlass app controls into the system. Instant Kinect command recognition is Microsoft’s main selling point for how entertainment will become better on Xbox One. But those features didn’t capture a lot of the headlines.

Analyst Michael Pachter of Wedbush Securities said in a research note that he liked what he saw so far but details that will determine long-term success will likely have to wait until the E3 trade show in June. Ben Schachter of Macquarie Research wrote there were great new features in Kinect integration for multimedia, some exclusive content and a confirmed 2013 launch.

“However, we saw nothing earth-shattering, and there was no word on pricing, not that we were expecting pricing just yet, which we think will be absolutely key in determining the pace of adoption beyond the initial launch surge,” Schachter wrote. “If a low initial-cost subscription model is announced at E3, it would be a meaningful positive in our view.  If not, we may need to wait and see if any key must-have platform-exclusive features or titles appear.”

Colin Sebastian, an analyst at Baird Equity Research, said that Xbox One should “be a contender in the living room battle.” He called the “all-in-one” living room box a “significant upgrade.”

“We view the broad capabilities of the Xbox One as likely to appeal to a broad market, although price remains an important unknown,” he wrote.

That battle isn’t just about games but in countering the incursion of iOS and Android platforms into the living room and overall consumer behavior.

“Overall, we believe the Xbox One reveal demonstrates that Microsoft has a capable platform in the living room battle, even if there is a narrow window of opportunity to build share before other platforms gain a foothold,” he said.

Based on reaction in forums, Xbox One hardcore fans appear to be upset about Microsoft’s failure to address three issues that go to the heart of a consumer’s “rights” when it comes to buying and owning their games and consoles. Microsoft said there would be no backward compatibility for Xbox 360 games, not even the digital versions of games downloaded from the Xbox Live Arcade. Microsoft also said there would be limitations on the trading of used games, though it offered a vague promise that it would have a solution for second-hand trading of games. And Microsoft conceded that, while the machine does not require an always-on connection, you will have to log into the internet about once a day to keep the console and games updated.

Kotaku’s Luke Plunkett raised those issues in a story headlined “That Xbox One Reveal Sure Was A Disaster, Huh?” Indie game developers expressed disappointment over the lack of self-publishing of apps on the platform. Rob Fahey wrote for GamesIndustry.biz that “After an awful start, Xbox One must redeem itself at E3.”

Meanwhile, Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia said that the news was also mixed for GameStop, the world’s largest video game retailer. The fact that Xbox One is launching worldwide in 2013 is a good thing for the retail chain, but he said that Microsoft’s position on used games (including misinformation about that) hurt GameStop shares. Microsoft corporate vice president Phil Harrison told us in an interview that Microsoft would release details later on how consumers can trade in and resell games. Clearly, the nuances of this policy on games — which will have to be installed on a hard drive and tied to a user’s identity — could have an effect on GameStop’s capability to buy and resell games.

“Xbox One appears to be the next logical step in Microsoft’s ambitions to dominate the living room with an all-purpose entertainment device,” Bhatia wrote. “A significant amount of time during the presentation was dedicated to showing nongaming functionalities such as the capability to switch to live TV, browsing, Skyping, etc. The mainstream media has generally praised this console, though the reaction from the gaming-focused media has been somewhat mixed.”

Microsoft said it has 15 games in the works at its own studios for release in the next year. Those include eight brand-new properties, and it is working on a Halo TV show with Steven Spielberg.

Microsoft left out some important pieces of the puzzle, probably to keep Sony guessing. The price, launch date, and supply levels will be important factors in how competitive the machine will be compared to Sony’s PlayStation 4, which is launching this fall.

“The user interface looked simple and seemed to be very responsive with no visual lag,” said Billy Pidgeon, a longtime game analyst. “It’s a powerful console loaded with many features, and it looks like Microsoft didn’t cut any corners. We’ll learn more about the most important aspect of Xbox One, the games, at E3. There could be a downside to the high-powered hardware — the price could also be very high.”

Schachter wrote in his conclusion, “Price, price, price will be key.”

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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For more on the Xbox One reveal, check out our complete coverage.

Microsoft’s new Kinect motion-sensing system for the Xbox One game console is so good that it’s creepy. Using its sensors, the Kinect can detect your heartbeat, simply by perceiving the pulsing of your skin.

That’s one of the cool — and scary — technologies that Microsoft’s new Xbox One, announced yesterday at a press event I attended in Redmond, Wash., can do. It is one of things that could move Kinect from a novelty to a necessary part of next-generation gaming and entertainment. It’s no longer a science project. Welcome to the age when your game console — and Microsoft — knows if you’ve been bad or good. It knows more about you than you know about you.

Games can use it to process physical feedback from you, increasing or decreasing the difficulty as needed. And you can use Kinect’s gesture and voice commands to control TV functions and navigate menus.

The new Kinect is a superbly upgraded version compared to the original Kinect launched in 2010. That system couldn’t detect a lot of things like your finger movements, and it was limited to viewing movements about 10 feet away or so. The new Kinect is accurate down to millimeter measurements, said Scott Evans (pictured at top), group product manager for Kinect.

The new Kinect has a 60 percent wider field of view so it can see most of a room. Kinect can now detect six skeletons, compared to two before. That means as many as six players can participate in a game at the same time. Phil Harrison, corporate vice president at Microsoft, said in an interview with GamesBeat that it is up to developers as to what they do with such technology.

The new system also has a color high-definition camera that can capture your image in a recording for Skype calls. The ultra-wide angle allowed it to pick up a bunch of people sitting in a faux living room that I visited in a lab on Microsoft’s campus on Tuesday.

“Xbox One demonstrations were impressive, particularly the improvements to Kinect for greater detail and higher sensitivity that have potential to add to the hardcore game experience,” said Billy Pidgeon, a longtime industry analyst.

And Kinect can see you in the dark because it has an infrared sensor that detects things alongside the primary camera. While Kinect previously relied on the system’s main processing chips, the new Kinect has its own dedicated silicon. Those custom chips (located in the Xbox One) handle audio processing for better voice recognition and image processing for visuals.

In the past, Kinect used “structured light,” or dots of light, to detect motion in a room. The new technology uses “time of flight,” or sending out light and detecting how long it takes for it to bounce back to the source.

Now Kinect has enough fidelity to correctly model your skeleton, capturing details such as whether your limbs are rotated. It can see how many fingers you are holding up and whether you are smiling or not. I stood in front of it and could clearly see from the image map that Kinect could see that my thumb was pointing up. You can see the shrug of the shoulders and other subtle movements that can be interpreted into responses to game situations.

The physics of your body is also recorded. Kinect sees which muscles you are using and how much pressure you are putting on them. If you jump, for instance, the muscle map of your body shows the parts that are stressed — your legs — in bright red, while the parts that aren’t show up in green. If you move your hand forward, Kinect can detect how much force you are using. If you punch forward at the camera, a big white circle shows up on the image map, indicating you are using a lot of force.

All of this data could overwhelm a lesser system. But Kinect is designed to capture several times more data in an area that is several times larger than before. It then sends that data to the Xbox One for game developers to interpret and use in their games.

The audio system still has four microphones with echo cancellation. The technology is directional. That means that it knows who is speaking in a room and it filters out other noises so that it can focus on what the speaker is saying. That makes it much better and faster at recognizing speech commands. If you are not looking at the screen, it will not register a command from you.

One of the coolest things is that it knows if you give the controller to somebody sitting next to you. Kinect will then record that person as the player, making a switch that would otherwise befuddle any other game system.

Six of us got in front of the camera and we were all moving about. The Kinect muscle maps showed accurately what every one of us was doing, with no delays in putting the imagery on the screen.

The heartbeat demo was the coolest feature, but it was just one measurement that Kinect could do that showed it could really understand what I, the gamer, wanted to do. Another demo showed how the force-feedback technology on the game controllers that you hold in your hand could also deliver the feeling of a heart beating. Between Kinect and the force-feedback controller, the possibilities for pulse-pounding, intense games seem very exciting.

Check out our video demos of the Kinect presentation below.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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With the reveal of the next Microsoft console coming tomorrow, there’s probably a larger portion of people than Microsoft would want to acknowledge who still shudder at the mere mention of the name Kudo Tsunoda, creative director of the company’s Kinect add-on for the Xbox 360. While I wouldn’t call Kinect an abject failure, it certainly did not live up to the hype nor the potential of the accessory. I fear a forced feeding of Kinect 2 or more motion controls that aren’t necessarily wanted in the 360′s successor system. While there are problems that any new hardware faces, I earnestly hope that Microsoft has considered some lessons from its Kinect past.

Do not sell what you do not have

Perhaps one of the biggest barriers to full-on Kinect adoption was that we believed — or at least hoped — that Microsoft was offering a controller-less PlayStation Move/Nintendo Wii control scheme. “You are the controller,” we were told. Unfortunately, the delay between movement and onscreen action was a little too noticeable to be as fun or connected for what serious gaming requires. While anticipation could be negotiated in lighter fare like Kinect Adventures, the lag between a person’s actions and the resulting onscreen acknowledgement dooms any game needing immediate, precise movement.

In an ideal world, motion controls for Tiger Woods seem like it could or should be a golfer’s dream — an off-season way to stay sharp and hone and improve real wold skills. But Kinect is not a fine enough sensor to capture the subtleties of a golf swing. Heck, even using Kinect to navigate menus, the goals of ease and simplicity are clearly further away than just picking up a controller and using the analog sticks and buttons. That the Xbox controller feels so comfortable in the hands of the player makes it that much tougher a sell what appears to be an over-promised gimmick at best and a complete pander to the Wii family crowd at worst.

It’s the software, dummy

Games, game, games. As great as the technology may be, if there’s no appropriate software to take advantage of the beast under the hood, then what do we have? Not a big step from the current generation. Certainly, systems have had weak launches and still succeeded, but to have an “it” game can really get the ball rolling in the right direction. Halo — ’nuff said, right? Looking at the Wii U launch, I don’t know that I could tell you what came out on day one. I’m guessing a Super Mario Bros. of some type?

But really, what makes a person make the jump? I have pondered during this past year the thought that I feel perfectly satisfied with the current console generation. Unless I’m offered something I don’t know that I want or need right now, launch day becomes more about the experience of getting on board early and less about playing what I can’t currently play.

For Kinect, Dance Central did just that. It was the game I could depend on to show my family and friends my new Xbox peripheral. It worked within the Kinect’s limitations and provided a show piece — fun play where frustration was minimized with no fail conditions. But before I realized it, “poker face” was irritatingly and irreversibly etched in my subconscious.

Of course, part and parcel of the “killer app” is the all important next wave of games. And for Kinect, I don’t count Dance Central 2 or Dance Central 3 or Zumba Fitness or Zumba Fitness Rush or Zumba Fitness Core as worthy successors. Gunstringer, Child of Eden, and Fruit Ninja all showed promise, but most often, software support didn’t come in the form of innovation or originality. Instead, options were limited to fitness and dance titles and their sequels.

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should

The last thing I think Microsoft can learn from its Kinect experience is that just because all these bells and whistles are available does not necessarily mean you need to use them. Microsoft described a number of games that were Kinect compatible but not required as “better with Kinect,” and yet, I don’t know that many (any?) of these titles were actually better. Did anyone use Kinect with Mass Effect 3, Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, Forza Horizon, or Tiger Woods? No, no, no, and no.

Of course, as with any new toy, I can see why a company would want to tout all of its features. But there’s a point where it’s too much. Don’t let features be crammed into a game just because your system can support motion or voice controls. If it’s part of the game … fine, but when it’s an add-on, the forced gameplay detracts from the natural flow and progression.

I have no idea what to expect come tomorrow, but let’s hope Microsoft remembers the past and heads in the right direction.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Tracking your eyes as you read a computer is a cool technology, but it’s expensive. Startup 4tiitoo says it has found a way to do it inexpensively by adding a clip-on for Microsoft’s Kinect motion-sensing system for the Xbox 360. The company launched a crowdfunding effort on Kickstarter today to raise $100,000 for the product. The experience is like getting the computer to read your mind.

The Nuia EyeCharm takes advantage of the low-cost infrared camera in Kinect. It clips on the front of the device and adds the necessary optics and special infrared illumination to figure out where your eyes are looking on a computer screen. With eye-tracking, the camera follows your eye movements and allows you to control a computer without a mouse or keyboard.

You can use the Kinect for Xbox 360, using a universal serial bus converter cable, or the PC. But this experience is focused on desktops for now. The user has to sit at a fixed distance from the screen. For $60, customers will get a suite of apps as well as Nuia EyeCharm device.

The Kickstarter page includes a video (embedded below) with demos of the eye-tracking working on applications such as games. The video includes Diablo III, Arma 2, and Minecraft. The company has already raised more than $35,000 and still has 22 days to go. 4tiitoo plans to launch the product on Aug. 1.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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July 9-10, 2013
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I’m going way out on a limb here, and cutting it off behind me.

But I have a theory. The more Samsung “adds value” to Android by customizing a version of it for the Galaxy line of phones, as it’s doing with its new Galaxy S IV, the more it will suck.

This is, of course, the company that sold 400 million freaking phones last year. And 57 million smartphones in just one quarter of 2012. Samsung seems, more than any other, to be the company that has shaved a few hundred billion off Apple’s share price.

But companies, like people, do best when they stick to what they’re good at. Better yet, what they’re great at.

And let me tell you, there’s no way that Samsung is great at machine language translation. And facial/eye recognition to drive smart document scrolling. And building app stores for hundreds of millions of global users. And tying Kinect-style hand gestures to phone functionality navigation. And building a personal health/self quantification system. And programming a voice-controlled smart personal assistant. And implementing a ticket-and-card aggregating Apple Passbook clone. And any of a thousand other software-based features Samsung is adding to its phones and laying at the pagan feet of the ruthless god called product differentiation.

No bloody way.

Not as good as Google, for the features that Google chooses to build, and are amenable to machine learning and improvement. Not as good as Fitbit or Up or other companies whose livelihood is self-quantification and health. Not as good as Kinect, or Leap Motion, which are focused on gesture control.

“Some of the features definitely didn’t seem to work all that well,” analyst Avi Greengart, who Samsung pre-briefed about its phone, told me today. “For the hover feature … you have pick the exact right distance from the screen for it to activate, and you select things you weren’t intending to select.”

Other features worked better, like a camera app that puts you in the picture while you take the picture, Greengart said, though he was most concerned about the sheer quantity of new features overwhelming consumers.

“A lot of it will drive people crazy,” he said. “But at the same time people will buy the phone so they can check it out.”

There are a bunch of reasons for that. One is that Samsung is not a software company, in much the same way that Intel, though it employs thousands of software engineers, is not a software company. Another is that ancillary features added by a company that is primarily focused on using those features to sell more of that product are seldom as good as the features created by companies that focus on those things exclusively.

But the big one is that Google is getting frightfully good at software. Partly because it learns a million times a minute as customers interact with its solutions, and data drives its decisions, but also partly because it gets mobile in a way that few other companies do. Google currently has five of the top six apps in North America on any platform.

Do you really think Samsung can build a better mobile user experience than Google?

I haven’t yet handled, played with, or slept beside a Galaxy S IV. But the early reviews on that cool eye-tracking technology that auto-scrolls documents for you? It works “better in theory than they did in practice,” according to CNet. And that neat gesture phone control technology? It seems to “work intermittently.”

ZDnet wonders if this is innovation or gimmicks, and Gizmodo hits the nail on the smartphone head:

Truthfully, there are too many modifications to go into, and most of them aren’t things you’ll ever use. Which is really the S IV’s biggest problem.

In other words, Samsung’s over-the-top Broadway launch for the Galaxy S IV might be the perfect metaphor for a phone that has everything you don’t need: A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer in your pants.

Now, we’re talking about unreleased hardware and software, and there are bound to be improvements before Samsung ships the Galaxy S IV to customers. But putting together a coherent, excellent operating system with well-integrated features is hard. Google went through multiple iterations before finally starting to get it really right perhaps a couple of years ago. Microsoft went through hell for years, trying to find its way in mobile operating systems.

Is it likely that Samsung, which is building on the Android foundation but chipping away at every piece of Google’s fingerprints it can while doing so, can get it right?

I think not.

“Look at the Samsung Galaxy S III,” ABI Research analyst Aapo Markkanen told me. “Everything that was good about the software came from Google, and everything that was annoying came from Samsung.”

Others that I’ve talked to agree, but still see a role for Samsung’s innovation.

“I agree that some of the software is buggy,” Rocky Agrawal, an analyst and mobile consultant who also writes for VentureBeat, told me. “If they would stick to the non-core things that they’re adding it could make sense … but to go in and mess up core stuff like keyboards and error correction, that’s just innovation for the sake of innovation. You should differentiate on things that matter.”

We have seen this movie before, during the 90s and 2000s, in a different industry: the PC market. Much as Android is to iOS what Windows was to Macintosh, Android vendors are to each other what HP was to Dell was to Compaq was to every other faceless PC manufacturer: a clone trying to be an individual.

And with every vendor trying to deliver unique value, a unique product, and a unique brand in a by-nature commoditized market, they get desperate. The result: software that adds a line item in the product comparison chart and a bullet point in the marketing blurb, but is really just crapware.

I’ve been there. I’ve done that. I’ve been that crapware vendor, sad to say, bundling a solution into HP’s, Asus’s, and even Intel’s offerings.

And my money’s on something similar happening here.

(Oh, and these user interface issues will be at the heart of our discussion at the Mobile Summit in Sausalito on April 1 and 2, where we’ve invited the mobile industry’s leading players. We’re hosting a wide cross-section of ecosystem from Google, Samsung, Facebook across the major carriers like AT&T and Verizon, to Cisco, Intel and the major analytics folks, like Flurry — along with the top 60 or so publishers and disruptive private companies.)

photo credit: Great Beyond via photopin cc

Microsoft has open-sourced some of the code for Kinect for Windows, its motion-sensing gestural control device for the desktop.

A total of 22 code samples have been posted to CodePlex, aka “Not GitHub.” Baby steps, baby steps!

Samples are available in C++, VisualBasic, and C# and include such elements as face tracking, depth of field, and audio capture/speech controls. Interested developers will need to download VisualStudio, .NET, and the Kinect for Windows SDK before getting started.

As Microsoftie Ben Lower wrote on the company blog, the whole goal of open-sourcing some of its most interesting technology is for the company to get feedback and rapidly improve on a game-changing device and accompanying software.

All the code samples are released under an Apache 2.0 license and are free for you to take, reuse, or remix. “Also, we’re using a Git repository so it’s easy clone & fork if you want,” Lower said.

In its preparation for Kinect-controlled Windows apps, Microsoft also recently released guidelines for gestural controls — a sort of white paper for app makers who are doing gestures for the first time and need standards, guidance, and expectations for users’ needs and wants.

A Xerox researcher has used Microsoft’s Kinect game sensor to measure how well a patient is breathing.

The inexpensive game device, which tracks 3D objects and motion in a room, could be an unobtrusive way of measuring the quality of a patient’s breathing and how much lung capacity they have over a period of time. As such, Kinect could help lower the cost of health care and give physicians information that they can’t otherwise easily get.

Lalit Mestha [pictured], a fellow at  the Xerox Research Center Webster in New York, said in an interview with VentureBeat that Kinect sensors can detect 3D shapes in a room, and this can detect the rise and fall of someone’s chest. From that, Mestha said in a presentation at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center yesterday that information on air intake, or the air inhaled and exhaled during normal breathing — when calibrated with other info, the data can be used to calculate total lung capacity. And from that, physicians can learn more about whether a recovering patient is getting better or worse. If a patient is slowly being strangled by something, Kinect could part of a system that warns nurses about the emergency.

The Kinect’s video camera could also measure other things, such as heart rate. (And if a game developer makes use of this, it could conceivably create a game that speeds up or slows down based on the player’s heart rate and breathing pattern).

Mestha said that besides costing less than medical systems such as ventilators, the Kinect system could prevent unexpected hospital deaths. On top of that, it can measure patients without requiring contact with the skin. That could be better for burn victims or infants.

Microsoft has been encouraging researchers to look at the health applications of Kinect since 2011. An independent study also found that Microsoft’s Kinect could reduce health care costs by $30 billion through remote monitoring.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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July 9-10, 2013
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Steve Jobs famously dissed styluses, preferring the body’s own natural equipment: fingers. Soon, Microsoft could be killing the game controller, too … and your TV’s remote control.

Or maybe even your keyboard and mouse.

Microsoft Research is always working on cool new features, and based on a video Microsoft just released, it seems clear that the next version of Kinect will be able to better recognize hands, hand positioning, and hand gestures, effectively letting you control your Xbox — and your PC — with just the equipment god gave you, right out of the box.

Here’s the demo video:

The company has a long ways to go, however, to catch up to Leap Motion.

Leap Motion is essentially a $80 Kinect for your computer, which is 200 times more sensitive than the current Xbox 360′s motion-sensing camera. You can use it to control virtually anything you might want to on your computers, and Leap Motion’s tiny sensor is amazingly precise. It tracks both hands and all 10 fingers at 290 frames per second, detecting movements as small as 1/100 of a millimeter.

We have no idea that the prototype Xbox controller is that precise: The video does not show individual finger control, and the screen shows 30 frames per second. (Which doesn’t mean it doesn’t have greater capability — Microsoft is certainly keeping some secrets.) But the Xbox is designed as a living room system, so it will likely have a much wider field of sensitivity and a much greater capability to recognize multiple people and multiple hands.

And note that the video says this is Kinect for Windows. Right now, that’s aimed at commercial markets such as in-store demoing solutions. But that’s just a tiny little sideways shuffle from being available for the PC in your kitchen, which you could then control from anywhere, no matter if your hands are full, or clean.

Really, the video hints at the future: Controllers for everything, in the air, hardware-free.

That’s amazing, and it’s no longer science fiction or a Tom Cruise movie.

Hat tip: Engadget

July 9-10, 2013
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Leap Motion, the hotly-anticipated “Kinect for computers” motion control device, will start shipping to consumers on May 13 and will be available for purchase at Best Buy retail locations on May 19, the company announced this morning.

If you haven’t already pre-ordered, however, the price is now a little higher: $79.99, up $10 from the pre-order cost.

In addition, the Leap Motion app store now has a name, and still no release date but at least a general timeline. COO Andy Miller told me yesterday that the company’s app store will be known as Airspace, and that it will be opening in the very near future. Fifty-two thousand developers have applied for Leap Motion developer kits, and 12,000 have already been sent out.

“We’ll be opening our app store for submissions very soon,” Miller said. “People are submitting apps already, even before it’s open.”

Those apps include Disney’s Sugar Rush, a racing game from the Wreck-it Ralph movie, a paint-in-the-air app from Corel, and a “devil-stick two-hand music beat app” from well-regarded game studio Double Fine called Dischord, which will enable users to make music in space.

“There’s a whole new world of interesting apps out there letting you do things you couldn’t ever do before,” Miller said, adding that innovation beyond what is possible with a mouse and keyboard is part of Leap Motion’s criteria for allowing apps into Airspace. “I don’t think Airspace will be hundreds of thousands of apps, ever. It’s curated, and if an app doesn’t meet our standards, it won’t go in.”

One more app that announced its upcoming availability is Clear, the Mac to-do list. Here’s a quick video from RealMac, the company behind the software, showing what it can do:

Leap Motion says its hardware and software is up to 200 times more sensitive than existing motion-control technology and can track the movement of all 10 of your fingers in increments as small as 1/100th of a millimeter at up to 290 frames per second.

July 9-10, 2013
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There’s still no official release date, but Leap Motion has already scored a major deal for its long-awaited gesture control gadget with Best Buy.

The Leap Motion Controller will be available at Best Buy’s stores and website for $70 when it launches this spring, Leap announced this morning. Pre-orders will begin on Best Buy’s website in February, though you can also preorder via Leap’s website right now.

Leap’s device, which can track up to 10 fingers for Kinect-like motion controls, made a big splash when it debuted last year. The company says it can track movements smaller than a pin tip, and it can track your hands at fingers at up to 290 frames per second. Pretty impressive for a device about the size of a stick of gum.

“Finding a major retail partner for our North American launch was a critical component to our strategy, and Best Buy was the obvious choice,” Leap Motion President and chief operating officer Andy Miller said in a statement today.

As a fan of Microsoft’s Kinect motion controls, I’m hoping the Leap controller lives up to the hype. The company is aiming to replace the mouse with gesture controls, which could lead to some interesting developments on touch-focused operating systems like Windows 8.

Leap announced a major bundling deal with Asus back in December, which will see its controller included alongside certain Asus models, on top of an additional $30 million funding round. The company also plans to build an app store for gesture-controlled apps, and it has already sent out 12,000 test units to developers.

San Francisco, Calif.-based Leap has raised around $44 million in total from Highland Capital, Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, and others.

July 9-10, 2013
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Just a few weeks ago, I wrote a piece on how a consumer-first company like Del Monte can learn from a mobile-first company like Fruit Ninja. Clearly, mobile developers have cracked the code on install-driven metrics around mobile marketing, but the reverse is still true – one needs to look no further than Rovio.

Rovio’s success with Angry Birds, the fastest growing game in history, is a great example of how app developers are applying some ‘traditional’ marketing lessons to drive more revenue. Since Angry Birds flew onto iPhones in 2009, Rovio has leveraged every aspect of the game’s iconic imagery via apparel, accessories, small amusement parks and a soon-to-be released animated series for the big screen. The studio even announced plans to delve into the credit card business with its launch of Angry Birds prepaid debit cards.

So Rovio, once on the brink of bankruptcy, learned from its past failures and acted like a consumer brand, not just a game studio, to reach new heights – with or without a slingshot.

Other game developers have picked up on the clue that in order to become a hit, it pays to think like the agencies on Madison Avenue. Here are three concrete actions to do just that:

1. Pursue a Cross-Screen Approach

Digital media ranges from TV to PC; it’s not limited to your smartphone or tablet. Since many users aren’t tied down to one device, it’s important to realize how they use each one in distinct ways. Someone itching for a cruise vacation may see an ad for a Royal Caribbean cruise package as a banner ad on his iPhone, but the chances of him finalizing the package purchase with this same device are slim.

Google recently released a series of case studies demonstrating the significant lift achieved by brands using a cross screen approach. Delta Airlines achieved a 105% increase in brand awareness and a 103% increase in brand favorability by extending their campaign from TV only to TV plus mobile. Similarly, Volvo observed 74% brand recall for users exposed to multiple screens vs. 50% for TV alone. Both examples point to the importance of targeting audiences and their behavior across all screens.

Successful brands understand this — and are pursuing a multi-screen approach. They use some screens for creating awareness of their product, and others for influencing the user to complete the product purchase or download. Since certain devices elicit certain behaviors, developers must start tailoring their message according to the screen that displays it.

Let’s reference our main mobile example, Fruit Ninja.

The game’s studio, Halfbrick, made marketing a top priority from the get-go, despite not having many resources to do so at the time. Clearly not made for TV, the Fruit Ninja’s web video advertisement, featuring two actors dressed as fruit being chased through a park by another actor dressed as a ninja, quickly went viral on the desktop web. Rather than viewing every screen as an acquisition opportunity, developers should learn how certain screens both complement and contrast each other in order to deliver an effective campaign.

2. Channel Your Inner Nielsen

Ten years ago, it would have been costly and difficult for a developer to target a highly educated, married female scientist who also happens to actively play its game. Traditional brands accomplished this goal using approximations on television audiences provided by Nielsen, the leading global information measurement company. They would further commission brand loyalty studies by firms such as Insight Express and Dynamic Logic to track customer lifetime value to a particular brand. Such studies are expensive and time-consuming, but are the lifeblood of brand management.

Developers, in contrast, have had to work through a tangled web of anonymous Android mobile web cookies, UDIDs, IMEI numbers, SHA-1 hashes and now Apple’s IFAs (“Identifier for Advertisers”), with little specificity about audience or intent.

Finally, there are tools available for developers to leapfrog brands in their use of audience data and insights to find the right users. This is particularly important to any developer who is looking to establish a long-term relationship with its users.

The most obvious examples are commerce (like eBay, Amazon, Groupon), travel (Expedia, Kayak, HotelTonight) and streamed media (Netflix, Hulu, Spotify), where a loyal user may generate $5-$20/month for several years. A high percentage of users, however, download the app, and then do not activate (ie. add a credit card and make a purchase), and in many cases, more than 80% of users neveractivate at all.

Groupon’s financial filings are instructive: from their Q3 2012 earnings report, only around 7.9% of users are active; they are earning $5.33/month from active subscribers vs. $0.38 from all subscribers. Assuming an 18-month lifetime value calculation, their value per average subscriber is $6.78, while their value per active subscriber is $95.94. Clearly, the ability to identify an active user is worth more than an order of magnitude greater to Groupon. Now, marketers are able to not only target audiences, but they can also monitor post install behavior (ie. did users activate or become frequent purchasers?) to inform acquisition strategies. These are tried-and-true methods that brands have employed, and are now in the hands of developers.

The top brands of today would be lost without data, add-ins, insights and analytics to measure brand performance. And that’s how most game developers are today: stuck using unsophisticated tools for targeting rather than taking advantage of the tools at their disposal to build loyal, lifelong relationships with their users. With post-install metrics, developers can build a performance strategy that goes far beyond install.

3. Extend Your Brand Beyond Screens and Into New Products

Apps similar to Fruit Ninja are also beginning to learn from global brands and following the Rovio model.

Fruit Ninja released its game for Kinect on Xbox this past summer (in addition to already being available on iPhone, Android, tablet and PC). The game was already familiar to more than 25 million people who play on mobile phones and tablets, but expansion to Xbox continued to strengthen the product’s recognition by honing in on a specific audience segment: highly active male players aged 12 – 17.

Halfbrick went a step further by reeling in an even younger demographic of players who may not even have access to mobile devices or play consoles yet: in June of this year, Halfbrick rolled out a partnership with several leading international consumer product companies to bring Fruit Ninja toys, apparel, shoes and more to the marketplace.

Similar to Del Monte’s variety of food offerings, Fruit Ninja’s new product partnerships are great steps forward in brand extension. Audiences buy brands, not operating systems and OEM specs. In order for games to become real brands, they must focus on expanding an audience profile, rather than just attracting more mobile consumers.

And there we have it. Cross-screen marketing, granular analytics and brand extensions are just three steps for taking a fun, mobile game and turning it into a household name. Any other ideas are welcome in the comments section of this story below. What else can games learn from brands?

Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan left her position as lead scientist at Google-acquired Admob in 2010 to create and found cross-screen mobile ad network Drawbridge. Named one of Business Insider’s “Most Powerful Women in Mobile Advertising (Meet the Most Powerful Women in Mobile Advertising: 2012),” she is an expert on advertiser-buyer connections in today’s mobile environment. Kamakshi attended Stanford University and received a PhD in Information Theory and Algorithms.

photo credit: blakespot via photopin cc

With the high volume of new products and flashy prototypes vying for attention at CES 2013, few have shown the kind of innovation needed to bring humanity one step closer to creating the ultimate consumer electronic device: a holodeck.

Yes, that’s right. The same holodeck from Star Trek: The Next Generation that uses light* to transform a room into a fully immersive and interactive environment of your own choosing.

Fortunately, Microsoft is working on a technology that could serve as the precursor to a real holodeck, (or at the very least a decent upgrade to Troy and Abed’s Imaginarium).

During the Samsung CES keynote yesterday, Microsoft gave a demonstration of a new research project called Illumiroom that fills a room with lights and images that coincide with what’s being shown on a TV screen. The experimental display tech uses Xbox Kinect — in conjunction with a projector — to scan the appearance and geometry of the room.

The demonstration primarily shows off how this kind of tech can enhance video games. For example, playing a first person shooter would adapt your entire wall as part of the screen, with the TV obviously being the center point. (See image below.) The result is the same view you’d see if you were actually holding a gun while standing on a battlefield.

We’ve embedded a demo video below from Microsoft Research showing the Illumiroom display tech in action. The company plans to share more about the experimental tech at the human-computer interaction conference CHI 2013 in late April.

* Technically, a holodeck uses a combination of force fields and photon light particles to give the illusion that you are not actually standing in a relatively small room on a starship. Trekkies, feel free to improve my explanation in the comment section.

Via Engadget

I just spoke to Google’s Pete Lepage about the Chrome experiment a Google team built in partnership with Cirque du Soleil … and about what it means for the future of web technologies on desktop, tablets, and smartphones.

The project is Movi Kanti Revo, which just won an award from TheFWA.com, and it’s an experiment in how to build and control native web pages and apps in news ways — for example, by accessing your device’s camera and allowing you to point your way through the interactive experience by tilting your head. In addition, it’s an experiment in creating full-motion photorealistic environments that play out in front of you like an interactive movie … all without a single visible movie embed.

“With Chrome experiments, we’re always looking for new ways to ship new technology,” Lepage said. “We’re always trying to do something completely different, completely unexpected. That’s where navigation came from.”

The technology is entirely client-side — nothing runs server-side in Movi Kanti Revo. Site developers used HTML to get the elements on-stage, and then created complex, nuanced transitions and transforms via new CSS3 animation properties. The team used Javascript to do facial detection for motion through the experience and changing the “camera” orientation live according to a user’s gestures, and delivered high-quality video in Google’s own WebM format for Chrome users on a desktop machine, but substituting H.264 for mobile users.

“It definitely took us a few months to build,” Lepage told me. “We spent a lot of time with designers … a lot of those scenes are hand-drawn.”

On desktop, however, there are limited sensors to access — primarily the webcam. Lepage sees more possibilities in mobile and is excited about what the native web can do in mobile.

“I think this is one of those things that is really going to take off on the web in a year or so,” he said. “And not just for casual games but for the big games too. Imagine playing Halo and having the webcam going automatically to chat with your friends.”

On mobile, there’s more sensor availability: orientation, movement, and, in newer phones, a front-facing camera. That promises to give developers abilities in the future that can only be imagined on an Xbox 360 Kinect-like environment today.

“That what’s exciting,” Lepage told me, “giving users access to things they previously had to buy special hardware for.”

And it does take some hardware: Movi Kanti Revo got the fan on my MacBook Air going after just a few minutes. Lepage says that’s probably the GPU, as everything on the site is hardware accelerated. But they had tested on Nexus 7 tablets and Chromebooks — not particularly beefy machines — and had seen “pretty good performance,” he said.

But hardware, including mobile hardware, is getting better every few months. And with it grow the possibilities for developers to create new experiences for their audiences.

Image credits: Google, Cirque du Soleil

July 9-10, 2013
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Big Brother has a new face, and its name is Xbox.

GeekWire has picked up on a Microsoft patent for a scary bit of sensor technology that can count and identify the people watching a television. Using the technology, content owners could charge consumers based on how many people are watching content, limit viewing to certain users, or punish consumers if they exceed their number of licensed views.

This so-called “consumer detection” could conceivably be implemented in future versions of Kinect, Microsoft’s motion-sensing camera.

And if you think you could just trick the Kinect by unplugging it, think again. If this sort of thing becomes commonplace, that camera’s going to need to be on. All the time.

It’s a brave new world — and it’s horrifying.

The really crazy part is that the idea isn’t even that farfetched. Many PC games already force players to maintain constant Internet connections in order to play them. Microsoft’s patent is just that technology taken to its most absurd extreme.

While people-detecting cameras sound like the kind of thing consumers would avoid buying,  keep in mind that there’s probably a camera staring you in the face right now. Attitudes change, privacy concerns relax with time. People learn to welcome their new insect overlords.

Fortunately, patents don’t mean all that much by themselves. Companies patent things all the time with no real concrete intention of acting on them. So, no, Microsoft’s probably not working on this right now. But it’s at least thinking about it.

The body roll is my holy grail. Though many variations of the dance move exist, the combination of leg, hip, chest, and shoulder movements that form a sultry, S-shape curve through the body stays the same. And yet, no matter how many times I keep practicing it in Dance Central 3, I still can’t pull it off. But at least the journey to get there is rewarding enough for me to keep trying.

Created by Rock Band developer Harmonix Music Systems and Backbone Entertainment, Dance Central 3 (out Oct. 16) is the third game in the Xbox 360-exclusive series. Using Microsoft’s motion-detecting Kinect camera, your limbs must mirror the correct positions and movements of the dancing onscreen avatars as you try to keep up with the pulsing beats of the title’s eclectic soundtrack. Just add a few friends, and all of a sudden you have an instant dance party in your living room.

Consider Dance Central 3 as your yearly reminder of why you bought the Kinect in the first place.

WHAT YOU’LL LIKE

Stellar soundtrack
With Dance Central 3′s curated list of 45 tracks, you — along with your friends and family — are sure to find at least a few favorites among them. Gloria Gaynor’s classic anthem “I Will Survive” and Van McCoy’s “The Hustle” finally make their expected appearances in the series, as well as the “Macarena,” Los del Rio’s catchy (or annoying, depending on whom you ask) single that practically took over the world in the mid ’90s.

DC3′s selection of modern hits is incredibly varied as well. Cali Swag District’s “Teach Me How to Dougie” leads the pack with its crushingly hard moves. Justin Bieber’s “Boyfriend” comes right out of the top 40. And the developers even acknowledge the burgeoning Korean Pop scene with 2NE1′s “I Am the Best.” As an added bonus, if you own any of the previous Dance Central games, you can import those tracks into Dance Central 3 for a small fee (400 Microsoft Points per disc). Any downloadable tracks you bought off the Xbox Live Marketplace in the past are also compatible with this year’s release.

Dancing through time
While a story mode is, arguably, inessential to a dancing game, I’m glad Harmonix thinks otherwise. Dance Central 3 takes you on a time-traveling tour of the most iconic songs, outfits, and locations from each decade, starting in the ’70s and continuing well into the future. It’s like playing through viral-video sensation “Evolution of Dance.”

The evil Dr. Tan wants to brainwash the world to follow his own brand of dancing, and it’s up to you, as a fresh agent out of Dance Central Intelligence, to stop him. Characters old and new help you out during your quest to decode the hidden “power moves” scattered in each time period. Once you find them all, you’ll uncover the decade’s special dance craze. The campaign is ridiculous and silly, but I appreciated the jolts of nostalgia in jumping from one era to the next.

Time traveling isn’t just a gimmick here, either. Some songs and dance moves actually build upon one another organically. A few of the basic moves you’ll learn during the ’70s part of the game give you a solid foundation of their mechanics since those same moves pop up again during more complex routines in later decades. DC3 doesn’t do this with all songs and dance moves, but it’s a neat feature which makes the story feel more than just a candy-coated tutorial.

Multiplayer nirvana
Harmonix merges cooperative and competitive dancing into an explosive mix with Crew Throwdown where two teams (of one to four players each) choose their crew, pose for a photo, and take on a series of 1-on-1 challenges against each other

Your team’s dance order is up to you. If a pure head-to-head battle is on deck, you might want to send your best dancer to compete. If it’s Keep the Beat, a freestyle mode where you have to dance with the beat (while being mindful of stealing your opponent’s “groove” by copying their moves), you should send someone who has at least a little sense of rhythm. My favorite challenge by far is Strike a Pose. Instead of dancing to a routine, you have to match the poses shown onscreen as fast as you can to rack up points. Your body will twist and turn in ways you’ve never imagined, and both crews will laugh their butts off at the ensuing comedy.

Regardless of the type of challenge your group faces, Crew Throwdown is sure to elicit some passionate cheering, boos, and smiles from anyone watching. You won’t even notice how tired you are until you actually sit down. Even then, you’ll still want to keep playing. That’s the hallmark of a great multiplayer mode.

And if Crew Throwdown isn’t your thing, or you want to play multiplayer without any pressure, the new Party Time mode offers a hands-free approach. Once you select it, the game automatically queues up a song and a mode, and any two players can jump in when they’re ready. If you don’t like the choices, you can simply change them.

WHAT YOU WON’T LIKE

Limitations of the hardware
I can’t help but feel like Dance Central 3 is held back by the Kinect’s constraints. The title works flawlessly most of the time, but little quirks here and there can disrupt the experience. The most frustrating part for me is when I do the same maneuvers shown on TV — moves that I rehearsed many times to get right — and the Kinect still thinks I’m doing them wrong, especially with tricky movements that involved any leg work. These issues made me feel like all that sweat and practice were for nothing.

CONCLUSION

Harmonix continues its fantastic legacy of music games with Dance Central 3. With its addition of 45 more tracks and routines to the franchise’s repertoire, and its suite of new multiplayer modes that push the genre in new and interesting ways, the series is stronger than ever. Whether you want to shed off a few pounds, learn some real dance moves for fun, or just want a great party offering to have on hand, Dance Central 3 definitely belongs in your library.

Score: 90/100

Dance Central 3 will be out on Oct. 16 for the Xbox 360. The publisher provided GamesBeat with a copy of the game for the purpose of this review. 

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Well, not really. But Kinect for Xbox could make that happen … if I was a kid.

Microsoft’s Xbox team and the NFL have joined forces to make America healthier and reduce childhood obesity. One of the incentives is an actual NFL star friending a kid on Facebook and giving him or her a “social autograph,” which kids can then share with their friends.

A Microsoft spokesman I talked to today called it “social memorabilia that can live forever” and ”the autograph of the 21st century.”

Xbox launched the Facebook app yesterday, and it’s called the 60 Million Minutes Challenge.

Source: Xbox/Microsoft

Kids participating in the challenge.

The goal is to get kids up, active, and moving for 60 minutes every day. Childhood obesity has more than tripled in the past 30 years in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control, but I know from personal experience with the Nintendo Wii that video  games with real-world motions can actually get kids — and adults — off the couch. And yes, I have built up a sweat to a Kinect game on Xbox!

“When you enter the 60 Million Minutes Challenge, you’ll be entered into the contest,” a Microsoft representative I spoke to this morning said. “If you win, an NFL player will friend you on Facebook, and will post a personal message on your Facebook wall.”

The project’s magic number is 60 million minutes of exercise, for which Xbox needs to get a million children to take the pledge. On day two of the contest, 30,000 minutes have already been promised.

One small fly in the ointment: Facebook contest rules around age. Down at the bottom of the contest page are these words (emphasis added):

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. Legal residents of the 50 United States (D.C.) 18 years and older at time of entry. Ends 2/3/13. To enter and for Official Rules, including odds, and prize descriptions, visit terms and conditions. Void where prohibited. The NFL Entities (as defined in the official rules) have not offered or sponsored this sweepstakes in any way.

When I asked Microsoft about that, a spokesman said they needed to play within Facebook’s contest rules, but that they’re looking for “kids of all ages to participate.” And, I suppose, kids can enter with parental permission.

So maybe I am back in the game.

photo credit: Axel.Foley via photopin cc

The Kinect system, which works with Microsoft’s Xbox 360 video game console and also the PC, can detect 3D movement in a room from a few feet away. But 3Gear has created technology that recognizes your finger movement, much as Softkinetic has done with its own gesture-recognition system.

With 3Gear, the mouse treats your hand as if it’s one big pointing finger. The touchscreen interaction is about sliding around pictures under glass, but 3Gear expects developers will use it for 3D applications rather than games. You could, for instance, grab things and turn them over or assemble them. It could be used in assembling 3D parts in computer-aided design or examine body parts in a medical imaging scan.

The imagery is right out of movies like the computer scenes in Minority Report or Iron Man. 3Gear believes mechanical engineers and 3D printing hobbyists will use it to make their work much easier. This tech firm is based in San Francisco and was founded this year. It has three employees.

Rivals include SoftKinetic, Leap Motion, and Omek Interactive. But 3Gear says its system is more comfortable and ergonomic. You don’t have to lift your hands very high to interact and your arms are supported comfortably by a desk. 3Gear says it developed new computer graphics algorithms for reconstructing the pose of the hand from 3D cameras like the one used in Kinect. The company also uses a database that lists possible hand poses and associates with them with how they would appear as data from the 3D cameras. At run-time, the program simply looks up the pose of the hand and displays it within milliseconds — a short time that makes the technology seem more responsive.

3Gear has raised $350,000. Investors include K9 Ventures (Manu Kumar), Aditya Agarwal,  Uj Ventures (Eric Chen), Safa Rashtchy, and Naval Ravikant. Co-founders include Robert Wang and Chris Twigg. The founding engineer is Kenrick Kin. Wang explored computer vision and human-computer interaction in his doctoral thesis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was inspired by early virtual reality work including some work by singer Michael Jackson.

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SoftKinetic grabbed some of the limelight at the Intel Developer Forum as the world’s biggest chip maker showed off “perceptual computing,” or how you can control a computer through hand movements, face recognition, voice commands, touchscreen swipes, or mouse-and-keyboard controls.

The Brussels, Belgium-based SoftKinetic makes gesture-control cameras and software much like the elements used in Microsoft’s Kinect motion-sensing system for the Xbox 360 game console. But SoftKinetic makes technology that can recognize gestures that are anywhere from 6 inches to 3 feet away from a DepthSense camera atop a laptop.

Intel believes that the close-range gesture-recognition technology is ideal for controlling thin and light laptops — dubbed “ultrabooks” — which resemble Apple’s MacBook Airs. SoftKinetic’s technology will be included in the software development kit (SDK) coming in 2013. Michel Tombroff, the chief executive of SoftKinetic, and his team showed us a hands-on demo of the technology. Here’s our video of it on display at the Intel Developer Forum at Moscone Center West in San Francisco.

SoftKinetic shows its close-range gesture control technology for laptops from Venturebeat on Vimeo.

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The age of perceptual computing starts with devices that can be controlled with the wave of your hand or the sound of your voice rather than just a mouse, keyboard, or touchscreen. Intel showed off an example of what it means today at its developer conference in San Francisco, and the startup behind that technology is SoftKinetic. With perceptual computing, you can control a computer through hand movements, face recognition, voice commands, touchscreen swipes, or mouse-and-keyboard controls.

Brussels, Belgium-based SoftKinetic makes gesture-control cameras and software, much like the elements used in Microsoft’s Kinect motion-sensing system for the Xbox 360 game console. But SoftKinetic has adapted its technology so that a laptop can sense movements by someone just inches away from it.

Intel believes that the close-range gesture-recognition technology is ideal for controlling thin and light laptops — dubbed ultrabooks — which resemble Apple’s MacBook Airs. SoftKinetic’s technology will be included in the software development kit (SDK) coming in 2013.

The technology includes SoftKinetic’s DepthSense camera that can detect finger movements while the company’s software takes the data from those gestures and simplifies it for a computer to process into specific operator controls. SoftKinetic can detect gestures as close as six inches away from the screen while Microsoft’s tech currently detects movement around eight-to-10 feet away or so.

“SoftKinetic is a pioneer and leader in the field of 3D gesture recognition who is helping us to make our vision of natural, interactive user experiences a reality,” said Achin Bhowmik, director of perceptual computing at Intel. “Gesture-based interaction enables humans to interact in a natural, intuitive way with their computer systems.”

Computer makers and software developers will use the Intel SDK to design computers with a wide variety of control schemes. This development, in turn, could help the PC deal with competition from smartphones and tablets. And that is strategic to Intel’s existence as the world’s largest chip maker. SoftKinetic is making games that will be included in Intel’s beta testing of perceptual computing, due to debut in the fourth quarter of 2013.

“We are excited to contribute our technology to the Intel perceptual computing program,” said Michel Tombroff, CEO of SoftKinetic. “We believe that natural-gesture interaction offers intuitive, engaging, and, most of all, personalized experiences for the consumers.”

Intel is demonstrating the technology at the Intel Developer Forum this week at the Moscone Center West in San Francisco.

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Starting next month, Kinect’s awesome gestural control powers are coming to commercial/consumer Windows apps, and to prepare developers, Microsoft is releasing some interesting new design samples.

Overall, Kinect coming to Windows desktop apps means that developers who have never had to think about designing for gestural controls are about to run into a fun new minefield of challenges. To help devs prepare for the inevitable, Microsoft has released a new set of guidelines and how-tos for creating these apps.

In a company blog post today, the Kinect for Windows team revealed that it’s launching a new runtime and SDK on Oct. 8, 2012. The release will bring “numerous new features that deliver additional power to Kinect for Windows developers and business customers,” including more sensor data for business or retail use cases, a best-in-class sample user interface (UI) for developers, and most importantly, support for Windows 8 PC apps. The update will also support Microsoft .NET 4.5 and Visual Studio 2012.

Here’s an example Microsoft recently highlighted that shows a Kinect being used at a car dealership:

In the new graphic user interface guidelines, Microsoft will give samples of principles it’s already laid out in detail (eg., while challenges in a game setting are fun, challenges in any other UI setting are frustrating.)

The company has already directed developers away from gesture controls for gesture controls’ sake. For example, if you require text entry, don’t force people to use a Kinect and a virtual keyboard — just stick to the physical keyboard. Don’t recycle non-gesture-friendly UIs; instead, only use innate-feeling gestural control interfaces that “feel ‘magical’” and that don’t get thrown off by normal human movement, such as nose-scratching or head-turning.

Also, Microsoft stresses that in addition to being intuitive — swiping a hand from right to left to scroll horizontally, for example — controls have to be easy to remember.

For game developers, this kind of stuff might be elementary by now, but for other devs and designers, it’s still largely uncharted territory. And reading a 70-page PDF of best practices is great, but seeing 70 pages’ worth of best practices in action is much, much better.

“This is this just the beginning,” writes Kinect for Windows manager Craig Eisler in the blog post.

“Microsoft has had a multidecade commitment to natural user interface, and my team and I look forward to continuing to be an important part of that commitment. In coming years, I believe that we will get to experience an exciting new era where computing becomes invisible and all of us will be able to interact intuitively and naturally with the computers around us.”

To date, Microsoft has sold 19 million Kinect for Xbox units since 2010.

Top image courtesy of alphaspirit, Shutterstock

Microsoft announced today a $40 price drop for the Kinect motion-sensing controller. The peripheral now retails for $109.99 in the U.S. A quick check of popular retailers in the States shows that this is effective immediately. This is the first price cut the device has seen since its November 2010 launch.

According to Microsoft’s Xbox evangelist Major Nelson’s blog, Kinect is also receiving a price drop across North America, Latin America, and Asia Pacific regions where the controller is sold, but a price has not been specified. Australia and New Zealand will see a price cut on Oct. 4. Prices across these regions have not been announced yet and will vary according to their area.

Microsoft specified that there are no plans for a price reduction in Japan, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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My left hand is completely useless. It can neither write nor draw, much less handle a basketball. But for 24 years of my life, it hasn’t been a problem. Until one fateful day in late July, when publisher Majesco Entertainment invited GamesBeat over to a hotel room for a NBA Baller Beats demo.

Exclusive to the Xbox 360 and out on September 11, NBA Baller Beats uses the Kinect, Microsoft’s motion and voice-tracking camera, for its rhythm-based dribbling gameplay. Unlike previous Kinect games, this one actually requires that you play with a rather unusual peripheral: a basketball (if you don’t have one handy, the retail release comes packaged with a full-size Spalding game ball). You can also use any other ball just as long as it’s in the general size of a basketball and not completely black in color.

I offered to let Majesco’s brand ambassador, Keenan Browder, demonstrate the game first before I embarrassed myself.

He played on “Pro,” a medium difficulty that falls between “Rookie” and “Baller.” These settings determine how many moves you’ll have to chain together in each song, as shown on screen via virtual flashcards. Browder deftly moved from one crossover to the next, bouncing the ball in near perfect harmony with Gorillaz’s “Stylo” track playing in the background. It’s a slow and easy song with well-defined beats.

Browder kicked up the tempo a notch with his next song choice, “C’mon (Catch’em by Surprise).” The TV exploded into an impressive display of brightly colored confetti and fireworks to celebrate his high score.

After Browder was done, Tony Chien, the product manager at Majesco, turned his attention to me: “You wanna give it a shot?”

Finding a rhythm

Rookie mode? Check. Slow song? Check. I gravitated toward a two-minute snippet of Queen’s “Another One Bites The Dust.” It wasn’t pretty. I missed the timing of the beats and the color-coded moves by a mile as the ball floated down the runway on screen. And whenever I had to switch to my left hand — the runway is divided into two lanes, one for the left hand and one for the right — I lost control of the basketball, ran to fetch it, and scrambled to find the rhythm again.

“One of the benefits [of playing the game] is really developing your skills,” said Chien, assuredly. “So you have court vision: You’re not looking down. You’re looking straight ahead. And you’re also dribbling with both hands. You’re building stamina for the court. This isn’t just another game where you’re sitting on the couch…. And there’s no pretend. Like in Wii and Kinect games, you’re pretending to do something, like playing tennis or bowling.

“[In NBA Baller Beats], you’re not pretending to play basketball; you really are playing basketball.”

Photos of my pathetic performance appeared on the TV. Much like with Harmonix’s Dance Central titles, the Kinect snaps pictures as you play the game, and you can later share them on Facebook. A YouTube share option is also in the works, but thankfully it wasn’t ready to be shown yet.

Feeling a little more confident, I selected a slightly faster song in Interpol’s “Obstacle 1.” The right-to-left and left-to-right hand switch of the crossovers still gave me problems, but now there was the added challenge of the pump fake: a move where you hop into the air as if you’re going to shoot the ball. But my timing improved from my last run through, and for the first time that day, it actually felt kind of fun.

NBA Baller Beats was growing on me.

But it’s not a fitness game….

At least not overtly. However, if you dribble, jump, pump fake, and practice your crossovers enough, little beads of water called sweat will be dripping down your skin in no time.

“[We] think it’s definitely a fun sports game first,” said Chien. “We’re not really considering it a fitness game. But that’s just the benefit you get from playing.”

Full disclosure: I’m not what you would call “in shape.” Playing through the two songs didn’t knock me out, but it was enough to convince me to take a short break. Surprisingly, the game lacks any kind of a calorie-counting mode, though it’s something Chien says they might consider for a sequel.

But this hasn’t stopped the development team, HB Studios, from losing a bunch of weight themselves, especially in the quality assurance department, where testers must play the game eight hours a day. Chien says even their producer lost over 40 pounds.

“One of the biggest issues that people, especially at E3, came up with was, ‘Well, I can just go outside and play basketball,’” said Browder. “Well, yeah, that’s true, but a lot of people aren’t going outside and playing basketball. They’re sitting at their couch and playing video games. So this is giving them the alternative. Instead of just sitting there, they can get up and actually get active.”

He has a point. Browder and I took turns in the game’s Battle Mode, a multiplayer experience where each player dribbles to the same song to compete for a high score. After soundly defeating me, pictures of our performance once again popped up on the TV.

“It makes you look like a baller,” he said, laughing. That’s good enough for me.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Bodymetrics is announcing a new service today that maps your body exactly so that you can have much better-fitting clothes when you go shopping at physical retail stores. The body scan can tell much more accurately if you’re really a certain size or not. It’s an example of how body-scanning technology can be applied to commerce in a way that, hopefully, transforms the shopping experience.

London-based Bodymetrics uses Kinect for Windows technology (the same kind of motion sensors used in Microsoft’s Xbox 360 game console). The 16 sensors can capture objects in a 3D space and convert them into digital data, showing the exact shape of your body and how clothes could fit on it.

The company is now installing Bodymetrics Pods (pictured above) at retailers. The first permanent pod will be at the Bloomingdale’s department store at the Stanford Shopping Mall in Palo Alto, Calif., the heart of Silicon Valley. (The company created a pilot pod for the Bloomingdale’s store in Century City in Los Angeles in March). And Bodymetrics says it already has a five-year track record at the Selfridges store in London, where it accounts for 20 percent of Selfridges sale of denim.

The idea is to take the friction out of shopping by getting you clothes that fit.

You can now create a Bodymetrics account inside a store, get your body precisely measured, and get access to this data from any mobile device or PC. You can then continue your shopping experience in either physical or digital stores. Right now, only about 11 percent of apparel sale take place online, since many customers can’t assess properly whether clothes will fit them or not. Returns to retailers can be as high as 40 percent, due to poor fits. Bodymetrics hopes to reduce the percentage of returns.

Bodymetrics was founded in 2000 as a spin-off from research developed by University College London. It now has 20 employees. Investors include TAL Group and Suran Goonatilake, the founder of the company. Bodymetrics has raised $8 million to date. Rivals include True Fit, Meality, and Fitted Fashion.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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San Francisco startup Leap Motion released some statistics today to show the high level of interest people have for its product. The company said it received 15,000 registration requests in the first week from developers wanting to take part in the Leap program. About 14 percent of those devs said they plan to create video games for the device, while 12 percent said they will create music and video tools. Eight percent will create science and medicine apps, 6 percent will work on web and social apps, and 4 percent will design education apps.

Leap is currently available for preorder. It costs $69.99 and is expected to ship in February 2013.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Microsoft could make a Wii Music-like experience for the Xbox 360, thanks to its Kinect motion sensor.

The company recently filed a patent application for a gesture-based MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) controller. The “free-space gesture controller or control system” in the patent application names Kinect as an example.

The application describes the following:

The free-space gesture MIDI controller technique described herein marries the technologies embodied in a free-space gesture controller with MIDI controller technology, allowing a user to control an infinite variety of electronic musical instruments through body gesture and pose. One embodiment of the free-space gesture MIDI controller technique described herein uses a human body gesture recognition capability of a free-space gesture control system and translates human gestures into musical actions. Rather than directly connecting a specific musical instrument to the free-space gesture controller, the technique generalizes its capability and instead outputs standard MIDI signals, thereby allowing the free-space gesture control system to control any MIDI-capable instrument.

It explains use with the Xbox 360 as well:

[0020] One such free-space gesture controller or control system that can be employed with the technique has a depth camera that helps to interpret a scene playing out in front of it. Together with software running on a computing device (e.g., such as, for example, a gaming console such as, for example, Microsoft.RTM. Corporation’s Xbox 360.RTM.), the free-space gesture control system can interpret the scene captured by the depth camera to determine and recognize specific gestures being made by the human in front of the device. These gestures can be mapped to specific meanings to corresponding notes, chords, sequences, transport controls, and the like.

The application explains that the mapped control signals could also be used to control MIDI-capable electronic instruments; this could include standard synthesizers and drum machines. Microsoft does have a Kinect MIDI controller available for download, but’s they haven’t used it in a game.

Here’s a video example with a popular digital audio workstation (DAW) called Fruityloops:

Another example could be similar to this Air Guitar Kinect hack:

It’s not likely to be practical for use in professional music composition with a DAW (despite what the video above shows), but it could easily make for an entertaining family game or app in Kinect Fun Labs. Here’s to hoping for Kinect Theremin.

[via Free Patents Online]

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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