Careful, it bytes!

Kinect, the future?

When Kinect first showed up as Project Natal it amazed everyone. It took a while, but now that is here, it may not be the promised land it… errhhh… it promised to be, for game designers. It poses a great question, because no games that rely on traditional movement of the character (I mean walking and running, for example) are fit for Kinect. It may be a good time to try a water polo franchise. I think I’ll try to sketch some game concepts for Kinect in the near future, it seems a fun exercise.

Anyway, one of the best things about Kinect is that, after a while, Microsoft realized the power of the open source community and finally made available Kinect drivers for Windows. However I still can’t afford a Kinect and, as such, it is with great enthusiasm that I got to know the OpenTLD project, a PhD project of Zdanek Kalal. I think there are some other open source augmented reality software frameworks, but from the demo this seems to work particularly well, and I really want to experiment with it.

P.S.: Just to add that, though I bundled Kinect with OpenTLD in this post, mainly because I got to know the latter through this article, they don’t seem actual competitors. OpenTLD is a tracking tool, it seems, that can track and identify objects in space, while Kinect is a 3D camera capable of understanding gestures such as closing your hand, and kicking.

In the beginning

Beginnings are tricky. When we face anything for the first time we have no expectations and because it’s the unknown we are talking about, there’s always a risk involved - the risk of wasting time if nothing else. That’s why beginnings are so important, because they set up the tone for whatever is coming after - and if they don’t set up the tone, they should, because we (almost) always assume they do.

Beginnings are even worse if you start by thinking something along the lines of “beginnings are tricky.” You build up the tension, you set the bar high, you long for the perfect beginning when actually the best don’t fare better than good, and you end up with nothing. And bad starts still beats none at all.

I guess that the best thing to do is to get over with the beginning as quickly as possible. Summarizing these points in two rules: be concise; give a hint of what’s coming next.

So I just found two rules of a good beginning and managed to break them both. I may have to start over.