Kinect will make you fit. Or kill you.

Managed to get some “quality” time with Kinect today. If by quality you mean “playing with it while the rest of the family looks on and laughs”.

Last Friday night I had a quick go with the Dance Central game, which did a very good job of tracking my body and telling me I wasn’t dancing right. This news actually came as no surprise, but the system was able to highlight in red precisely the bits of me that were in the wrong position, which was impressive. Although at one point my whole body lit up red…..

Today we fired up Kinect Sports and had a fun with Table Tennis, Bowling and Field Sports. Table Tennis is very impressive. Not quite as good as PlayStation Move at tracking the precise angle of the bat you are holding but getting everything else right. Playing without something in your hand feels strange at first, but soon you stop thinking about it and just get on with the gameplay which works a treat. Bowling is good too although my opinion of this might be coloured by the fact that I got a strike with my first ball. Maybe this is programmed in… Anyhoo I soon settled down to business as usual, with gutter balls and impossible spares appearing with disturbing regularity.

Field Sports nearly killed me. The Long Jump was particularly scary. Fortunately we have quite high ceilings in our house, although I was also worried about the ceiling in the room below collapsing when I landed. If you are looking for a fun way to keep fit I can strongly recommend it. Especially if you have high ceilings and concrete floors.

So, Kinect works. You can’t use it sitting down, but then again volleyball sat down is never going to be quite as much fun anyway. It does what it says on the tin, in that it seems to know where you are and what you are doing. If you wave your arms your mannequin on the screen waves too. If you throw the discuss into the ground, so does the chap on the screen.

Great fun.

In Praise of Long Focus Lenses

Went up town today. Took a long lens with me. Quite pleased I did really.

We do seem to be having some nice weather at the moment.

Definitely not delayed

Headed back today, after a very busy week. When I checked in at the airport the girl at the desk made a few phone calls and then assured me that my flight was not going to be delayed.

I took this as a warning sign.

Turns out the flight was delayed, but fortunately for me I had such a long wait for the next one that I arrived home at the proper time.  Bad weather in Holland meant that the landing at Schipol, on the only runway they were using, was a bit more interesting than usual. Suffice it to say that the pilot earned his round of applause at the end.

When I got back we had fish and chips and then shot up town to pick up a Kinect. Had a very quick play. First impressions? It works, amazingly well.

TechEd 2010 Day 4

Once I’d finished my talk and recovered I went for a wander around the exhibition. Of course I took the camera.

This makes the labs we have back at Hull look rather puny….

They had some Kinect systems out there. Looks like fun. With a bit of luck my system should be waiting for me back in Hull.

In the evening we went out for a meal at a posh restaurant. Thanks to Amina for the invite. Great company and good food.

Whizz Bang Phone Session

The delegates as they arrived, thanks for being another great audience.

Did my final session of TechEd 2010 today. Fun was had, and everything worked including the demos. I’m going to put Cheese Lander on the Windows Phone Marketplace at the weekend. I just hope nobody beats me to it……

As usual, you can get the code behind everything that you saw from here.

You can find the Farseer Physics engine here:

http://farseerphysics.codeplex.com/

You can get all the Windows Phone stuff here:

http://create.msdn.com