One piece of technology I’ve had my eye on in recent weeks is the Xbox Kinect. For those of you that haven’t heard of it before, it’s a new controller for the Xbox 360 that reads your movements and allows the game to respond to what you’re doing. It’s similar to the Wii controller, except you don’t have to hold anything. On top of the camera, it also comes with speech and facial recognition, making it an all round input device rather than just a game controller.

I’m not convinced though (although I have it on pre order). For navigating the Xbox menus I think it will be great. If you watch a lot of DVDs through the console then there’s something nice about not having to use a controller, although I hope that the slightest movement won’t set it on pause. The thing is, I don’t know how developers are going to use the technology in games without it turning into a gimmick.

Take a shooting game for example. Are you going to have to use your hands as a gun? If so, how do you move? Is the whole game going to be on rails? If you’re playing a sports game, do you need to actually kick a football? How is this going to be relaxing?

There are obvious games that are going to work well. I think Microsoft is bundling a game that’s been developed for it with a number of sports games, so that is bound to be a success.

A big advantage is that it can support four people. This means you don’t have to buy four different controllers, because everything is controlled from the box. It is quite expensive, but considering it’s almost like a new console (it is being shipped at the same time as an Xbox Live dashboard update), I think it’s worth it. Hopefully the Kinect’s release signals the move away from new consoles being released each year, and the start of console upgrades with new systems released less frequently.

Similar problems have occurred with the Nintendo Wii. It’s a great concept, but most of the games use it as a gimmick rather

Keep checking back, because when the Kinect is released I’ll probably add my own review to this site. It should be interesting if nothing else!