- What Exactly Is This Feature?
- How Does This Feature Work?
- Should This Remain a Little-Known Feature?
Should This Remain a Little-Known Feature?
Well, for one, the official Kinect website http://www.xbox.com/en-US/kinect has one small image link near the bottom of the very busy web page. My experience of developing websites and analyzing what people look at on different web pages tells me that Microsoft is not marketing this functionality very aggressively. There have been some very small clips in some of the Kinect commercials of a couple of young teens talking with one another, but it usually is somewhere in the middle of the commercial and isn't an interesting enough clip for anyone to really care.
However, with the news of Microsoft purchasing Skype for 8.5 billion dollars, there is no doubt that video chat functionality between mobile devices and Kinect is fresh in the minds of the new Microsoft Skype division employees. In a press release by Microsoft on May 10, 2011, Xbox and Kinect were some of the first devices mentioned in the statement of new devices Skype will support.
Kinect has definitely brought the futuristic video communication of the sci-fi movies into the reality of your own living room through the big screen TV.
I imagine that in the near future we will be communicating from our Kinect to our iPhone, Android, Windows Phone, PC, Mac, or other devices that Skype has apps for.
So the answer is a very emphatic no. Video Kinect should not remain as a little-known feature any longer.