Microsoft unveils Avatar Kinect with facial recognition

SOFTWARE OUTFIT Microsoft has released a highly anticipated feature for its motion capture device called Avatar Kinect, which further enhances the Xbox 360's ability to display exactly what you're doing.

Avatar Kinect adds some of the functionality of the Nintendo Wii's Mii feature, but goes beyond simply displaying a caricature of who you are by allowing full body capture, and, even better, full facial recognition.

The Kinect can already capture full body movements, which is useful for dance games and similar titles, but capturing the nuances of a person's facial movements is an entirely different ball game.

Avatar Kinect can track the movements of a person's head, their mouth, and their eyebrows, giving a very impressive digital rendition of what they look like and what they are doing as they speak. It does not track more subtle movements like blinking or facial twitches, but it's certainly enough to get a hint of emotion from the person behind the avatar.

Users will be able to play around with their avatars in one of 24 virtual stages, with up to eight people present on screen at any one time. You can create a chat show style environment, which could spice up normal group chats between friends and colleagues.

To celebrate the launch of Avatar Kinect, Microsoft got comedians to try to be as funny as they could be in 90 seconds in front of a Kinect camera, which then converted their movements into a fully-fledged digital comedy show called the Avatar Kinect Stand-Up Comedy Fest. Users can vote for their favourite for a chance to win a Kinect.

The potential for comedy is big with Avatar Kinect, as we can imagine what it would be like to get a person who is all hands sitting beside a person who barely moves as they talk. We wonder if we can smack nearby avatars if their hands are constantly in our face.

Avatar Kinect was first previewed at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in January, with an expected release date of some time in the Spring, but it appears that Microsoft had to hold it back a bit to get everything working the way it wanted.

Microsoft also promised earlier this year that the Kinect would at some stage be able to recognise even smaller movements like the individual joints on a person's fingers, which could open up even more ways in which to play games. Microsoft just launched Kinect Sparkler, which shows off the hand movement capability of the device, hinting that this will be the next major update to come to the Kinect.

Avatar Kinect is available for free until 8 September for all Xbox Live users, but after that users will need a Gold account to use it. µ