News: Microsoft updates Kinect seated play

According to Eurogamer, Microsoft has updated and refined the software behind Kinect's ability to detect seated players.

Much concern arose during E3 earlier this year when the motion sensing peripheral encountered problems detecting sitting or lying down players. It has been revealed that this was due to Kinect setting the base node used to create the skeletal model of the player at the bottom of the spine.

This meant that if players were to sit with their knees raised in front of their pelvis Kinect wouldn't be able to detect them properly.

Luckily Microsoft seems to have realised that most gamers spend the majority of their time slumped on a sofa, hence the company has opted to switch the base node from the bottom of the spin to the back of the neck.

“It means that should the bottom of your torso get confused with the sofa, because your bum and your legs are enveloped inside the sofa, it doesn’t matter because your hands and arms are still working,” Andrew Oliver from Blitz Game Studios told Eurogamer.

Before the new update, developers wanting to create games in which players could stay seated had to create the software to do it themselves.

We can't wait to see what developers throw our way when Microsoft launches Kinect for the Xbox 360 sometime next month.

Microsoft updates Kinect seated play

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