Home / Channel / General Tech / Microsoft say Kinect will change how we use computers

Microsoft say Kinect will change how we use computers

Microsoft may be having some problems right now with Windows 7 Phone software, but in the land of gaming they are reaping the rewards, selling over 8 million Kinect units in 60 days.

Craig Mundie, Microsoft's Chief Research and Strategy Officer says that the Kinect way of working offers a taste of how we will interact with computers. He says it is a ‘natural user interface' that along with voice commands will redefine the future of computers. Mundie also suggests that computers will be willing to complete mundane tasks for humans who find them boring.

In this case Microsoft may have a point, the sales figures of Kinect have surpassed all expectations and a wide audience have been embracing the new technology, with a hard core modding community finding weird and wonderful uses for the device, outside the confines of the Xbox 360 platform. With Microsoft supporting the Windows community now, we can only see more creative ways for this device to be used in the coming months.

Not all the uses will have to be productive either as we can see from the excellent light sabre hack above.

Mundie says that it is his job to look 3 to 20 years ahead from today and that Bill Gates always had a long term view, even when he founded the company many decades ago.

It helps us weather the storms,” says Mundie, “and from time to time we inject new capabilities that take the products forward by a significant leap. Sometimes one of those leaps is so new and significant that it is disruptive and opens up a new market. Kinect would be a good example of that”.

He says that touch, voice and gesture should be a new means to control a computer. “For a long time, the computer has been used as a tool. We have been trying to work out how to make it more like a helper, so that it acts with a degree of autonomy, understands you, and starts to become intuitive.”

KitGuru says: Microsoft certainly seem on the right track with this, and with such an active modding community already creating weird and wacky new concepts it will surely only improve over the coming year.

Become a Patron!

Check Also

Seagate debuts new 30TB Exos M and IronWolf Pro drives

Seagate is bringing two more mass-capacity drives to the market. This week, the company announced …

2 comments

  1. That light sabre hack is incredible, imagine the fun you could have with that with a few buddies and some costumes ! the star wars diehards will be out to get that for their own movies.

  2. Youtube has so many of these kinds of videos, im amazed at what people can do with this device. its stunningly good.

We've noticed that you are using an ad blocker.

Thank you for visiting KitGuru. Our news and reviews teams work hard to bring you the latest stories and finest, in-depth analysis.

We want to be as informative as possible – and to help our readers make the best buying decisions. The mechanism we use to run our business and pay some of the best journalists in the world, is advertising.

If you want to support KitGuru, then please add www.kitguru.net to your ad blocking whitelist or disable your adblocking software. It really makes a difference and allows us to continue creating the kind of content you really want to read.

It is important you know that we don’t run pop ups, pop unders, audio ads, code tracking ads or anything else that would interfere with the KitGuru experience. Adblockers can actually block some of our free content, such as galleries!