A few months ago, we got a taste of dashboard-surfing with a Kinect camera, and we liked what we saw. Er, felt. Er…spoke?

Pardon the confusion, but for 360 owners, it’ll take some time to figure out the vocabulary of Kinect — whether we’re describing the device or actually using it. After all, controller-free gaming is new for us; for some Xbox-ers, motion gaming is, too, unless you play regularly with a Wii or a PS3 Move controller. So, needless to say, getting our hands on a Kinect and hooking it up to our very own 360 was exciting and…disarming at the same time.

Fortunately — well, unless you have a few friends over, bugging you to load Dance Central — Kinect’s setup and calibration process gives you some time to get comfortable with the gizmo. In a series of setup screens, you’re reminded that the camera needs to be two to six feet from the floor, centered above or below your TV. After the Kinect runs a few checks (background noise, speaker noise, microphone calibration), you’re pretty much ready to go unless the device isn’t reading you well, in which case you can enter the Kinect Tuner. Otherwise, you can move on to the dashboard.

SCREEN-HOPPING


If you’re using a Kinect to navigate the 360 dashboard, you won’t see the same menu structure as someone using a controller. Waving your hand to activate the Kinect or saying “Xbox, Kinect” will take you to the Kinect Hub (see screenshot on previous page), a more limited dashboard menu that offers slides for your Friends list, Achievements, Avatar Editor, ESPN, Zune Marketplace, and more. (We tested our Kinect prototype on a preview version of the new 360 dashboard, so what we saw may be slightly different than what you’ll see.) Jumping into each area is as simple as putting your hand on its slide or saying its name aloud (“Zune,” for instance).

Know this: using your hands to jump from screen to screen isn’t the whoosh-whoosh, lightning-fast screen-shuffling shown in sci-fi flicks like Minority Report. Though moving around within a channel is fairly instantaneous — for example, scrolling left to right between the multiple screens comprising the Kinect Hub, or between the screens in ESPN’s main hub — hopping from channel to channel or backtracking in other areas usually involves a slight delay of a second or two. Moreover, you can’t hop from screen to screen with just a broad flick of your hand; you typically have to position your hand at an exact height so its on-screen representation lines up with an icon or a slide, which tells the Kinect to warp to the indicated location. Using your voice to navigate with Kinect has the same mild delay: about a second or two between the time you say “Xbox, Kinect” (or whatever) and your arriving at that destination. More important, though, is that — as with Kinect’s hand-gesturing — you simply can’t do everything that a controller lets you do. You have most of the broad functionality, but for nitty-gritty actions — like, say, entering a 25-character download code or your credit-card info — you still need to pick up your controller (or a keyboard). It’s possible that a future Kinect/dashboard update could add full dashboard functionality, but for now, what you can do with your hands and voice is limited.

Is it cool to bounce around your 360 using your hands or voice? Sure — for the novelty if nothing else. Just know that neither method is as fast or efficient as navigating with a controller, and that for now, you’ll still need a controller handy for specific functions.

WHAT WORKS, WHAT DOESN'T

Having used a Kinect in a few rooms, we can confirm that it does work better in larger spaces. In a big room where we stood 10 feet from the device, it read us pretty well, with few problems. But in a small den where we could stand only five feet from our Kinect — not the recommended six-to-eight feet — we had a couple of issues. The camera seemed to stop reading us at times, requiring us to do the friendly “Kinect wave” (sweeping your hand in a windshield wiper–like motion) so it’d “see” us again. And in this tiny room, we couldn’t set up Kinect ID (a feature where the camera auto-detects you) at all because configuring it requires that Kinect view you in various spots around your room, several of them more than five feet away. Interestingly, though, our Kinect read us just fine when we sat on a couch about five-and-a-half feet from it — maybe because our hands were in plain sight of the machine.

Dashboard-wise, our favorite use of Kinect was in the ESPN and Zune Marketplace channels. Watching sports replays and TV/movies certainly isn’t as speedy as it is with a controller, but it’s pretty full-featured (you can play, pause, fast-forward, and so on with your hands or voice), and using your hands to find an exact spot in a video clip is a tricky, almost minigame-style pleasure.

Places we didn’t like using Kinect include the Achievements list and Avatar Marketplace. In the former, your options seem limited (just bouncing between slides), while Avatar Marketplace’s many sub-menus made us all-too-aware of how much faster we could dress our Avatar using a controller.

SNAPSHOT

From the time we’ve spent with our Kinect, we’d call it more intriguing than essential at this point. Its voice and motion functionality have loads of potential, but for now — in both the dashboard and the launch games reviewed on the following pages — it definitely has limits, and not everyone will love it.

Will you love it right now? Depends on a few things:

* Who’ll like Kinect: Gadget freaks; people with a big gaming space; video-chatters; anyone intrigued by Dance Central or fitness games.
* Who won’t like Kinect: Folks for whom speed is paramount; people with a tiny gaming space; anyone who doesn’t want to talk or move their hands/body while dashboarding or gaming.

One thing’s for sure: we’ll be spending lots more time with Kinect. Watch for more coverage in the coming months...