Once selected, you simply flick your hand in the desired direction to flip the screen left or right. Arrow buttons at either side of the screen let you navigate left or right, and as the pointer nears one, the interface performs a magnetic “snap-to” trick facilitating faster selection. Hold your hand still and once the timer ring completes, your selection launches. Say “KINECT” from here and the hub springs to life.įrom here, your hand operates like the tip of wand, and moving it over a selectable button, panel, or icon causes a ring to appear and slowly fill like a clock. You can alternatively bring up the Hub with a voice command by saying “XBOX,” which slips a black bar up from the screen bottom and presents a list of command options. Once you do, the Hub slides into view and assumes command. Waving one hand back and forth in front of the sensor and you’ll bring up Kinect Hub, the interface control center for the sensor.

If you have an older model, you’ll plug the sensor into one of the Xbox 360’s standard USB ports and power it using a wall adapter included in the box. Kinect draws power directly from newer slimline Xbox 360s by plugging into a special orange-colored USB port. The cameras reside in a tube of glossy black plastic about the size of a paper towel tube, attached to a motorized stand that you position facing you two to six feet off the floor above or below your TV screen.

Perhaps because of these problems, Kinect’s games tend to be forgiving by design, which has its demographic flip side: Gaming with Kinect is pretty much “casual” or bust. Sometimes you’ll pull off a move in a game when it’s clear you goofed, or fail when you should have succeeded, and the sensor often overplays a small gesture or underplays an exaggerated one. Whether the problem’s caused by lag, an algorithmic limitation, or insufficient processing power, it translates as moments where Kinect seems to misread or outright ignore you in ways Nintendo and Sony’s systems don’t. Kinect tends to process slow or exaggerated gestures without a problem, but badly garbles fast or subtle ones.

Xbox 360 with kinect prices