We know you’re excited for Halo 4, Gears of War 3, and Forza Motorsport 4, but there’s one piece of software announced during Microsoft’s E3 press conference that you can get your hands on right now; Kinect Fun Labs, a free hub for gadgets that, in the eyes of Microsoft, will enhance your Xbox 360 experience. So let’s check it out.
Kinect Fun Labs is a new hub designed for ‘gadgets’, individual pieces of software, games and tech demos that offer various amounts of functionality, and a new home for developers to deliver software custom built for Kinect. Think of it as an App Store for Kinect tech demos and you’re pretty much there. The interface is fairly slick and similar in design to the current Kinect dashboard, with a series of icons representing a selection of different gadgets available. There are also options to play your last played gadget, download the latest gadgets, access your Friends Feed and check out popular gadgets. Each gadget also comes with eight achievements worth a total of 50 gamerscore.
Fun Labs comes supplied with two gadgets pre-installed – Kinect Me and Kinect Googly Eyes – and upon selecting a gadget you’ll be taken to a menu with options to play it, ‘Like it’ and see both yours and your friends shared posts from within that gadget. At the moment all of the Fun Labs gadgets are free, although we can see Microsoft charging a few points for future downloads.
Downloading a gadget, however, seems fairly painful. Unlike Xbox Live Marketplace downloads, downloads for Kinect Fun Labs require you to remain on the download screen while they download to your hard drive. The gadgets currently available are just over 200MB, so depending on your bandwidth be prepared to be standing around for a while.
First up on the pre-installed list of gadgets is Kinect Me, a piece of software that scans in your face and body to create an avatar more representative of your real life self. Kinect Me analyses every element of your presentation, from your body type, clothing, hair and facial features, and the resulting scan seemed fairly accurate. Our avatar wasn’t too far off – and certainly more lifelike than the cartoony styles of the current avatars – though the colour artifacting on our avatar’s face made us look like we’d gone down with a horrible disease. Lighting conditions, as is perhaps to be expected, can be key to getting good results.
Once you’ve scanned yourself in you can take a series of photos of your avatar in various poses, and record a voice message to be posted to your Kinect Fun Labs Friends Feed and uploaded to KinectShare.com. KinectShare itself is well laid out and uploads are incredibly simple to view and share, with options to share to your Facebook account, print or download. Our only concerns lie with the uploaded videos, which seem to play back at a ridiculously low bit rate. Whether that’s due to server load on the site due to the day one rush, however, is hard to tell.
But that’s it for Kinect Me. Functionality is limited and scans can’t be saved, meaning they’re lost whenever you exit the software. It seems a bit of an oversight that you can’t apply the scan to your actual Xbox 360 avatar, although we’re sure the guys at Microsoft are working on a way to make it happen sooner rather than later.
Kinect Googly Eyes allows you to scan in objects, pop googly eyes on them, and bring them to life with your hands. The gadget can be quite selective in what it lets you scan in. Attempting to scan in an SLR camera, for example, told us that the object was too wide. Scanning in an Xbox 360 controller proved more successful, but the software also scanned in our hands, resulting in an oddly shaped object. The texture resolution of the resulting ‘puppet’ was horrific, too. Unsurprisingly we found that the bigger – and less detailed – the object, the better the result.
Once your object is scanned in you can record skits, morphing the object’s size and shape with your hands, and like Kinect Me, this can also be uploaded to KinectShare. Also like Kinect Me, the appeal of Googly Eyes probably won’t last for too long.
On to the downloadable gadgets, of which two – Bobble Head and Build a Buddy – are currently available for free. New gadgets like Kinect Sparkler and the previously announced Avatar Kinect also promise to be downloadable soon.
Bobble Head is similar to Kinect Me, letting you scan yourself in to become a huge-headed bobble head doll. In good lighting conditions Kinect proved to be fairly accurate, right down to picking up intricate detail on our t-shirt, and the software is fun, although again incredibly limited. Once you’ve scanned yourself in and given your bobble head a voice, it’ll sit on a car dashboard alongside three other bobble heads. You can slap the head around with your arms, but ultimately, there’s not a whole lot else to do. Again you can share with your friends via KinectShare, and thankfully, Bobble Head also saves your bobble heads on exit – a basic feature, of course, but one missing in other Fun Labs gadgets.
The most amusing gadget, however, proved to be Build a Buddy, a gadget which, like Googly Eyes, lets users scan in an inanimate object and bring it to life. Rather than directly manipulating the object with your hands, however, Build a Buddy lets you select from various options to give it a personality – bouncy or brainy, crazy or cool etc. – before animating it by acting out movements in front of the Kinect.
Again the software is selective in what it allows you to scan. Build a Buddy wouldn’t accept our Legendary Edition Halo 3 Master Chief helmet at all, for example, but did scan in a flight stick. As advertised during Microsoft’s conference, the software is perhaps better suited to soft toys. Build a Buddy’s charming and harmless fun, and the resulting characters can be quite amusing – but again, if you’re over the age of eight, once you’ve tried it once you’ll have had all the fun you can get.
Kinect Fun Labs is certainly fun, but given the current gadgets available, for many gamers, the fun offered by Microsoft’s latest software is bound to only last for five minutes. With better gadgets we can see real potential in the app-style gadgets of Fun Labs and the innovation Kinect may offer developers, but for now, Fun Labs seems more an interesting experiment than any real breakthrough.
Tags: Kinect Fun Labs
Crysis 3, Medal of Honor: Warfighter, Borderlands 2 and Far Cry 3 previews plus reviews for Prototype 2, Sniper Elite V2 and The Witcher 2.
Download Now!
