Microsoft’s next Xbox 360 Dashboard update can be packing enough deep Kinect integration to make your inner Anderton tingle with glee, however it won’t do you much good in case you live in a shoebox apartment, cramped dorm, or happen to possess a couch. For all of its fun tricks, the Xbox’s stereoscopic sensor is woefully farsighted, and doesn’t play nice in case you stand too close. What’s a motion loving, spatiality challenged gamer to do? Well, we’ve heard of 1 option.
Nyko announced the Zoom for Kinect quite a while ago, making lofty promises of reducing the sensor’s minimum required play distance by as much as 40 percent. It performed notably well once we gave it a whirl at E3, but with Redmond’s Kinect heavy Dashboard redesign just round the corner , we thought we’d give it a re-assessment.
Contrary to its name, the Nyko Zoom actually gives the Kinect a much broader view of your lounge. The attachment’s fisheye lens broadens the sensor’s standpoint, theoretically providing you with more playing space. Does it? Mostly. Kinect Adventures seemed perfectly happy to observe us jump, kick, and flail about in wide-vision, letting us rally balls and rush rivers from a cushty five feet — easily closer than Kinect’s recommended 6-8 foot distance. Dance Central didn’t mind our fresh perspective either, and a lot of the 1 Fun Labs 1 content we tested didn’t bat a watch on the sensor’s new prescription. We did hit a number of snags, however — although navigation was generally smooth, the cursor would occasionally jump and stutter. Menu items nestled inside the corners of the screen is also difficult to toggle, and we found that smaller framed gamers sometimes needed to stand toward the sensor to be recognized properly. Our dainty cohort needed to stand as close as four feet from the television to be recognized during a round of Dance Central.
The fisheye distortion also caused some apps to misjudge the subject’s posture, lining up with Kinect Me’s scanning pose, for example, required thrusting one’s hips back while leaning forward. Despite these gripes, we won’t say that the Nyko Zoom doesn’t deliver on 2 its promise 2 . On average, the sensor’s new specs brought us two feet toward our TV — that’s 25 percent if we’re averaging against the high end of Microsoft’s six-to-eight foot recommended playing distance. Although that isn’t quite the 40 percent the box claims, understand that our experience is offset by us not eager to stand eye-meltingly near our 40-inch set. In case you do not have a huge living space and might wrestle with just a few quirks, this peripheral could easily be worth your $30. On the end of the day, the Nyko Zoom got us off the couch and playing Kinect without making us rearrange our furniture, and lets be honest, that’s all we actually wanted anyway.
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