Designing Kinect-Based Experiences

More than 10 million Kinects have been sold since the depth- and gesture-recognition Xbox accessory first launched in November (selling so quickly in its first 60 days that it beat out the iPhone and iPad for a Guinness Book of World Records award).  Given that it’s aimed at a much larger consumer audience than the Xbox has been, and with Microsoft’s announcement of an official Kinect SDK on April 13, it’s likely more of us will be designing for Kinect-based interfaces in the near future.

I recently partnered with two talented developers to prototype a Kinect-based experience. We had the opportunity to observe more than 30 people use the prototype, which allowed for some great, ad hoc user research.

After the jump, you can read my takeaways and design recommendations based on observations of our experiment.  I’ll also try to post any new Kinect info I might gather from MIX11 next week.

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