So Close, Yet So Far With Xbox One's Kinect

Good format and duration for this, Patrick.

Great video Paddy, but the background music was a bit too loud on too many occasions!

I like this, I want to see more of what actually does and doesn't work on the Xbox One. I've given up on using kinect. I guess I should try Bing.

Much appreciated video. I would vote for more in a similar vein.

I am a PlayStation guy having a decent time with my PS4(camera-less for now), and while I don't have any plans in the near future to purchase an Xbox One, I am curious about it's functionality and how things are 6 months or so in. I haven't heard much positive talk when it comes to the new Kinect's voice control functions, but I couldn't tell if that was just finicky gamers who didn't really want to like that part of their Xbox One anyway.

Thanks for giving your impressions and some of the positives and negatives from your use so far. It must be a tall task to get every app on-board and integrated with Kinect voice control, but l also feel like if that is what you are going for, you really have to go all out. It sounds like it is neat and serviceable but far from perfect. The good thing is that it can improve with updates...hopefully it does, with the increasing numbers of apps on the consoles, it would be helpful to have something that eased navigating through them.

This was cool, @patrickklepek--it communicated the inefficiencies and shortcomings of the Kinect in a manner that would have been unachievable, or at least underemphasised, via a purely textual format. Slightly reminiscent of the glossy (yet, sadly abandoned) video reviews of yore. Tonally, it was on point, and a pleasant departure from more recent methods of content delivery. I look forward to more videos of this type.

Well done Scoops

Look at all these comments!

Good job, Patrick. I also vote for more of these!

Inconsistencies between apps are largely developer dependent. Have you checked out the YouTube app? It does some crazy stuff that goes completely against Xbox One design philosophy. I'd love to see a scathing review of that.

How did I not know about evil bong 3? My life was a lie until now.

I want to see more stuff like this.

Great video Patrick! We usually only see usability in carefully orchestrated demos and after we buy the product and try them out ourselves so it's great to see normal usability without having to see/own the product first-hand and you still kept a critical eye on things that are wonking or not working (hopefully Netflix will update it's app with better voice support to match Amazon but there is no guarantee of that). Anyway, more of these would be great!

A controller is pretty consistent.

I like the format. It's kinda like The Point with Danny O'Dwyer.

More videos like this.

This was great Patrick. keep em coming.

More please, Patrick!

Love this video. More videos like this.

Great piece and I loved the format - would definitely love to see more of this on the site. Thanks Patrick!

what was that shit at the end?

I like this change of style.

Make more please.

Awesome, more please. Great to see you are not afraid to try new stuff, keep it up! Very refreshing, more new formats!

The hand stuff is GARBAGE. I cannot stand it. Plus, the amount of times the hand stuff has been randomly triggered when I'm lifting up my arms to stretch on the couch is...sigh.

awesome little video, as someone who just ordered a xbox one this week, this interested me greatly!

I like this different approach, the tone was good and it's the right length. I hope there are still written articles, it's good to read things on my phone whe commuting back and forth to work. It's not ideal to watch videos ona train

...Evil Bong 3

Oh Patrick voice over and the music, more of this feature!

I also love voice commands Patrick! Been saying they could be so great long ago when everyone was slagging off the original Kinect (or even back when that 360 RTS which had voice commands came out, what the hell was that called again?) and your title here is pretty damn accurate. Ah well, give it some time.

Instead of doing "Next page... next page... next page...", you can reach forward with your hand, close your fist (almost as if you were grabbing the tiles) and slide the pages left and right with your hand. Easy.

The beauty of Kinect is it lets you mix and match input methods--voice, gesture and controller--in whatever way makes the most sense for you. You don't have to stick with voice commands when it doesn't make sense to use them.

I like what you did here Patrick.

Totally spot one with Kinect, it's nearly awesome. It actually feels great when you can jump right in a series you've been watching without using greasy pizza fingers.

I KNOW!

@graboids said:

A+

Nicely done!

Oh shit! New episodes of Psych!

Great essay video piece Patrick, here are my 2 cents on the situation...

Voice control is niche, and Microsoft's approach to selling the Kinect is why you have what is the current disjointed, inconsistent interface on the Xbox One (or all Microsoft products of late).

If you are going sell a platform that claims to allows you to control/navigate (almost) everything with your voice you better follow through with your claims by making sure IT'S EVERYTHING... otherwise you end up frustrating and incovinecing the end user as they try to figure out when voice control can be an optimal option when using the system.

Netflix and Amazon develop and manage applications on hundreds of other platforms and devices. They also have no incentive to implement or utilize features on specific platforms as it would just add to already staggering task in making sure the apps are functional for what they are used for.

With Microsoft paywalling most of media applications one would/should expect some sort of enhanced experience as you are paying Microsoft to use a service that has it's own paywall of which can be accessed on every other device free.

From what I saw in the video, at the moment Netflix on Xbox One is no different of an experience than what can be found on a Playstation, Nintendo platform or pretty much any internet enabled device, minus the abysmal "Modern/Metro" interface.

Moar! I wan't moaaarrr! This was great and I would love to see more content like this from you Patrick. Maybe even doing some sort of video journalism. A combination of the dumptruck along with video of the game and the interview. Something of that nature. I'm excited for whatever comes next. EAST COAST MUTHAFLUFFERS!

I loved the video but you need to add a subtitle to make it obvious its a GB thing, Scoop's video scoops or something dumb like that would work awesome.

Also bring the music and stuff to the dumptruck.

This is good. More good is better.

I really liked this. An article in the form of a well-edited video is the kind of stuff I want to see, Plus the music was dope.

This was super cool. Let's see more of it.

Loved the mood and format of this. It almost demands that you watch it with a cigarette and a tumbler of scotch.

Definitely want to see more content like this, as well as videos like the behind-the-scenes E3 video that Drew put together!

@patrickklepek Loved this video Patrick! As sad as it seems for me to type this out, these days I'm much more likely to watch a video than read an article, even if it's effectively the same words just read aloud. The whole production itself was great, with good editing to a great choice of music in the background.

Also, by having a voice, it can help to convey a specific tone that is sometimes easier to misinterpret in written form. I'll gladly watch more of these if you decide to make any more!

Yeah Patrick, this has nothing to do with the technology not working properly but just bad human user interface design - the focus of your video being with the app developers and not Microsoft at all.

The fact that Kinect is bundled (at least for now) is a good thing as it will force the technology, and design, to improve. If they continue to bundle Kinect and work on it just imagine what things will be like in 5 years... Remember the launch of the Xbox 360 and you couldn't even download a demo in the background, you actually had to wait for it to finish before you could navigate away?

I am totally with you on these app designs though. It actually infuriates me in Netflix that when you say "Xbox Select" it covers all the titles with a blacked out box and you can't easily see the content you want to enjoy. That right there is completely bonkers design and should have been fixed by now. Microsoft needs to enforce a better design policy with these app providers.

Oh and please don't release any more videos showing how bad Kinect is when it is you who is to blame for not understanding the commands. It's crappy and unintuitive, yes, but basically when you see something in green that is what you are supposed to say. So saying "Xbox Select" then "Xbox Go To Netflix" doesn't work. It's either "Xbox Go To Netflix" or "Xbox Select" ... "Netflix". This shouldn't be the case but something they should fix in a future update as it's stupid.

Now let's hope they also address the issue of having to say full titles for games, because that is also a bad design decision. Let me say "Go To Fifa 14" because I really don't want to say "Go To EA Sports Fifa 14" every time, that is just ridiculous.

More!

more.

More.

MORE.

Good content, bring mooaaar!

Love it! Very entertaining, and better than just a writeup. I bet it took some time to do though...