Home Gaming Kinect is being held back by USB 2.0

Kinect is being held back by USB 2.0

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Blitz Games founder, Phillip Oliver, has revealed something quite interesting about the Kinect and why there is a limit on what can be done with the camera and motion capturing.

A lot has been said about the camera being downgraded from HD res to its current SD standing but the quality of the camera isn’t the problem that Blitz Games ran across. The problem they are experiencing is that the Kinect connects to your Xbox 360 through a USB 2.0 port, they had to for backwards compatibility, and as such the transfer rate just isn’t quick enough for full motion capture.

Thankfully for Blitz Games Microsoft was able to offer a solution with some automatic cropping and zooming which means that they didn’t need to cancel their upcoming Kinect title, Yoostar, which will have the player acting out scenes from a movie.

This USB limitation isn’t going away anytime soon so anyone with dreams of full HD motion capture is just going to have to wait for Xbox 720 with built in Kinect ability.

However Phillip is also quick to point out that they love the Kinect, he feels it’s a genius idea and that it’s going to sell really well. Blitz’s first Kinect title, The Biggest Loser is available now and while it hasn’t received enough scores for a Metacritic result yet it has been doing pretty well.

The 3 reviews so far are sitting at 85, 80 and 60

Source: Gamerzines

Last Updated: November 23, 2010

4 Comments

  1. Grant Hinds

    November 23, 2010 at 11:55

    Interesting. I never thought of this before but it makes absolute sense. It’s actually very promising because future consoles can pretty easily solve any lag issues. Maybe that’ll be the moment for a sweet FPS title?!

    Reply

  2. Bobby Kotick for Dummies

    November 23, 2010 at 12:05

    Bollocks! USB 2.0 is more than capable.

    And who the heck are Blitz games? What games have they produced that are worthy of mentioning?

    Reply

  3. Uberutang

    November 23, 2010 at 13:19

    LOL, indeed… Barbie Horse Adventures: Wild Horse Rescue

    Reply

  4. Marcus

    November 24, 2010 at 08:15

    umm, no USB 2.0 has a max transfer speed of 480 mb/s

    and 20 percent of that is unusable because the system uses it for packet syncing and other such uses

    so usb 2.0 is indeed WAYYY too slow for HD Motion Capture And HD RGB

    Reply

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