Kinect is very effective at tracking the player's entire body, but what about fingers? Well, that's not something that's likely to happen any time soon during normal play, partly because gamers come in all shapes and sizes, so the difference between a kid's fingers and an adult's can be quite huge, but also because the depth map sensor which looks after skeletal tracking is only 320x240, which really isn't high res enough to accurately manage such a feat.
That's not to say fingers can't be used to control games, however. Here's what Kudo Tsunoda had to say when we asked about finger fidelity:
"There's easy ways to build a design that enables you to do what you want to do, so we built a prototype early on in Kinect that was like a stealth safe-cracking, thief kind of demo. You could sneak around and it was cool because if other people came into the room and started talking it would set off all the alarms and stuff, just because there's the ambient noise, but you could get up to the safe, and the safe would be far away in the room, and the only way to bring the safe closer up to the TV would be to walk up to the sensor, and then by the time the safe's close enough to the TV that you want to interact with it, you're close enough to the sensor to do it with your fingers... Good design can always make the experiences and the fun that you want."
Sounds interesting, right? What we'd love to see is some of these early tech demos polished up and released as a cheap package on Xbox Live Marketplace. What better way to show off the unique ideas that didn't make it into retail titles?
Kinect's Safe Cracking Tech Demo - Xbox360 News at IGN
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