Kinect 2.0 Sees Everything – Including Things Best Kept Covered

When the original Kinect was announced, there was a joke about people playing games in the nude, especially in relation to Lionhead’s unreleased Milo. That’s not a problem any more, as Kinect 2.0 picks up on your bits whether you’re wearing clothes or not.

This “feature” was spotted by Mark Wilson at FastCoDesign, and can be seen in the video above (as well as in the various pictures on the FastCoDesign website). Wilson asks whether developers should do something to hide this, but shouldn’t they actually take advantage of this high level of body scanning? Imagine, a game controlled entirely via Dong.

There are a lot of people complaining games aren’t hard enough for them any more. Maybe this could fix those complaints.

From FastCoDesign:

Almost everything in this article is laughable, so I’m not going to pretend that Microsoft is violating us, or spotting anything that a strong squint couldn’t already see. And I’m certainly not going to imply that some exacerbated shadowing around someone’s crotch will defile the youth of our society. The new Kinect certainly isn’t malevolent; it’s just engineering that works a bit too well, and is sharing that a half step more socially than we might want it to be.

As increasingly capable technologies become more personal, we’re going to have to think less about what we can do, and more about what we shouldn’t do. Whether it’s Kinect staring at our crotches, Amazon peeking into our buying habits, or Facebook leering at our social life, the technology industry will have to continually strike a design balance between the granular information they see and the information about ourselves that we see.

Because if I’ve learned one thing in 31 years of masculinity, it’s that nobody ever wants to see my placket-racket flopping around in the living room.