John Carmack ‘Not Really Sold On Kinect’

During his 2013 Quakecon keynote, legendary Id technical director John Carmack made his feelings know about Microsoft’s Kinect device.

‘I think Kinect still has some fundamental limitations’

After very briefly discussing the new consoles from Microsoft and Sony, Carmack spoke for several minutes on what he saw we’re the shortfalls of Microsoft’s camera peripheral for the Xbox One.  Carmack sites latency and frame rate as two of the main issues with using the Kinect for games.  He also said some of the standard interactions with Kinect, things like position and hold, are ‘fundamentally poor interactions‘.  He pointed out that other movement based devices like the Playstation move or the Sixense Razer Hydra have some fundamental advantages due to their inclusion of physical buttons you can click.

Carmack went on to compare Kinect based interactions to touch based interactions, which he feels have propelled gaming forward substantially.  He feels that because with the Kinect you are not directly manipulating the on screen action it is simply not as strong a tool as a touch interface.

Important to note is that Carmack is not against the Kinect technology as a whole, he just doubts it’s ability to stand up as an interface for gaming.  He stated that he feels Kinect is a technology that ‘absolutely has a future‘ but followed that up with ‘I’m still not completely convinced that that’s the cornerstone of the next gaming platform‘.

So what do you think?  Are you sold on Kinect as a gaming interface? or  Should Kinect be used to drive the OS and gaming be left up to the controller in your hands?