Rick Reifenstein

I played with the Kinect for a little over an hour last night. Wow! It does everything Microsoft said it would. There was nothing I needed to excuse away as what you get with cutting edge tech. No! Kinect is awesome! Even though I ordered a few of the other games for Kinect, I only played all the games on “Adventures” to start with.  After the first round of “Rally Ball” I was ready for a short break and a glass of water. This thing gives you a whole body work out. I suspect that the fitness games for the Kinect will make the Wii Fit games look like retirement home exercises. Of course Kinect also allows you to use gestures and voice to control movies and navigate through the dashboard. All was easy to do and learn. Instructions pop up on the screen. I found the voice recognition to be very good. Despite being a little sore from yesterdays Kinect session; I plan on trying out the Kinect Sports tonight.

Fall has come to Virginia painting wonderful colors in the sky and on the mountains. While I have taken the time to enjoy them this year, I have also been very busy looking at upcoming New User Interface advancement both in the areas of computers and gaming technology. I am waiting for my Kinect to arrive. The downside it’s a Christmas present for the family so I’ll have to play with it in secret. I think that the impact Kinect will have with the computing world will be felt much broadly then just gaming. Motion capture will surely be integrated into the next Windows OS Win8, which will enable it’s use for small gestures and facial recognition as well as large scale manipulation of objects and data like we saw in the movie “Minority Report”. Microsoft Research is already working with this technology in the lab in the form of prototypes. It’s important to keep in mind though that these advancements take time. I’ve followed two Microsoft Research projects from just research to full prod

I love NUI's! I know Steve Jobs said that it's unnatural to have a touchscreen on a laptop because of arm fatigue. To a certain degree he's correct. But you don't constantly have your arms up at the screen. You do bring your arms to a resting positon. Teachers do it everyday when using black and smart boards in todays schools. After several weeks of using my new 20 inch HP multitouch screen at work, being forced to use a trackpad or a mouse is like going back to the stone age. I find that when I'm working at home on the laptop or at somone else's computer my natural instinct now is to use my fingers to move windows, close programs, touch and hold for the right menu choices. At first it doesn't seem natural because are used to using a mouse or a trackpad. It seems almost primative to think about using your fingers. But using your fingers to move things around and to select choices are the most natural. It's what we want to do in most situations if you wer