Some projects integrating Kinect on the PC and windows phone have begun to appear on the internet.
Hot on the heels of the news of Kinect for Windows SDK beta refresh being out, we found videos of people using Kinect and transmitting the data to windows phone.
Essentially what these projects are doing is that they are running the Kinect capture software on the PC, and then using a small server on the PC to transmit the data to the Windows Phone. Using this technique, we can give an extra swerve to your car if in addition to tilting your phone, you tilt your body as well!
What I found in many of my game reviews for Windows Phone Sauce was that touch controls for games on Windows Phone leaves something to be desired. Whenever a game required me to constantly touch or drag on the screen, I found that the friction between my finger and the glass soon became rather unbearable. I prefer tilt controls to touch controls, whenever continuous input is required. The problem with tilt only controls is that it can only do one thing – for example, rolling a ball, or swerving a car. It cannot do complicated things like shooting bullets, activating nitro, strafing or braking suddenly. Those things require you to go back to touching the screen – which when you combine with tilt controls may make gameplay awkward.
Case in point: I love Katamari – an Xbox Live game that requires you to guide a ball. There are strafe controls in that game, for which you have to touch and hold on the side of the ball. There is a sudden braking functionality, for which you tap and hold on the ball. To accelerate suddenly, you tap furiously, repeatedly. This is very awkward to do while the phone is tiled 30 degrees away from you.
Having Kinect has the potential to solve many of these problems, because you can combine body movements with the tilt controls on the phone. If you are playing a football game, for example, you tilt your phone to control the players, and you kick your leg to shoot the ball.
In order to run any of these examples, you will need a kinect controller and a PC on the same network as your phone. While this is definitely less ideal, we can clearly envision a future when – at the very least – the PC component of this setup is replaced by an Xbox 360, and you can run this entire set up on your living room couch.
