Rahk said:
Do you move your head/neck/shoulders when playing a game though? I typically look straight at the screen, and if I were to move my head I'm sure I'd correct myself if the view changed too much. I think it would be pretty intuitive.
First off, I don't have a Kinnect, so all of this conversation - at least from my end - is purely theoretical. But yeah,
if I am sitting up and playing games I do tend to wriggle around from time to time. My usual pose is lying down on the couch, where I tend to move my head, adjust the pillows, etc. But this is playing with a controller and not a Kinnect. Obviously I would have to adjust to the new input type.
I just wonder though if this is another case of "the thought being far better than the reality." It's a nice idea to be able to move your head to change the view, but... meh, it really doesn't seem that great to me, in practice. I like the idea of playing a realistic fighting game and being able to actually control the my avatar's complete movement, everything that I do replicated 1:1. Realistically, though, I'm only a theoretical student of fighting, knowing many styles, practices, etc, but only through watching mixed martial arts. I would most likely suck at such a fighting game and would find the reality of it frustrating and not too much fun.
In practice, any game like that will probably have you perform certain motions that will then translate into a animation on screen. For me, there's no more immersion in that than there is having to input (1/4 circle forward + A) on a controller. Sure, I'm moving my body in a slight facsimile of the action I want to be performed but I'm not sure if that puts me 'further into the game' than using a controller.
To bring it back to the original head tracking point, I think that this suffers from the same problem. It's a form of control that sort of requires the real world equivalent of what you want to do but not really. I'm sure you'll get used to keeping your eyes on the screen while moving your head but it kind of takes the shine off of it. At least for me, it does.
I don't know, you can probably all just start ignoring me. I fall further into the ANGRY MAN CHASES CLOUDS AWAY FROM PROPERTY stereotype each year. I know I don't have to use these control methods, and I probably won't (beyond the Wii, which you can't escape most of the time). As long as these devices are offered as an
alternative to a traditional controller with there being no disadvantage to using one, I will remain happy (or keep my currently level of 'angry at the world'. At the point that it become a standard "eh, you could use a controller to play the games... but, y'know, I probably wouldn't" is the point that... eh, I just hope we have a completely VR system by then.