Before CES began, a picture of a promotional slide from Microsoft's press conference snuck out. The image showed off something called "Avatar Kinect," which turned out to be an actual discussion point in the press conference that took place yesterday afternoon (via Joystiq).
As the speculation indicated, Avatar Kinect is a visual chat room that turns you into an Avatar and transports big groups of Kinect-owning friends to a variety of locales, such as a talk show, a "gothy forest" or a sports network. At the press conference, speaker Steve Ballmer made it a point to show off that the service can recognize and track eyebrow movement as well as broad gestures. This stuff in particular looks pretty good, though avatars in general are pretty cartoony, meaning the amount of detail you can translate to them is limited.
One more thing: if you'd like to hold on to your chat session and share it with others, you'll be able to do just that. In the teaser trailer for Avatar Kinect, it's noted that you can export your sessions to Facebook. Neat!
And in other Kinect news announced at CES, Hulu Plus and Netflix will receive gesture-based controls this spring. According to 1UP's report, how these controls will actually work were not shown, though it's easy to assume that they'll be similar to the Zune app's support.
106 Comments