- Getting Started with Kinect
- Netflix App and Gesture Support
- Power of Your Voice
Netflix App and Gesture Support
Through gestures you can open the Netflix app, navigate the suggested movies list, start a suggested movie, or control any movie once it has already been started. The caveat is the limited browsing option of suggested movies only. The Netflix movie categories and search options unfortunately still require the controller to search with the virtual keyboard. But once you get any movie up and running, you have full gesture support for pause, stop, rewind and fast forward.
To open the Netflix app, you will first go through the Kinect Hub. You will not see the Netflix tile right away because it is the next screen to the right. Navigation to the next screen involves a hand hover over the right arrow icon and a swipe gesture to the left. Scrolling into view is the Netflix tile among other app tiles. Hover your hand over the Netflix tile, and you're in business.
For navigating the suggested movies list, hover over the right arrow icon and swipe your arm left to view the next set of four movies. To the left and right of the TV screen there are now left and right arrow icons that allow you to hover your hand over and swipe to navigate to the previous or next set of suggested titles. To play the movie of your choice, just hover your hand over the movie icon for three seconds (see Figure 3).
Figure 3 Gesture and voice-enabled video selection screen
While playing any "watch instantly" movie, you can wave your hand to get a video status bar dialog box at the top of your screen that shows you how many minutes you are into the video. Hover your hand over the hand icon and you can wave your hand left or right to rewind or fast forward. A preview window displays a frame from the video to illustrate where you are in the rewind or fast-forward process. Swipe your arm down into the preview window to play the video from this point. It does take a few minutes of practice to get the hang of it. But I found it well worth it to easily control your movie without the need to pull out the remote.