With Kinect, Microsoft is finally getting it right. And that is because Kinect, while it incorporates ridiculously advanced technology and software, is not about technology or software. It is about delivering an immediately accessible and understandable new way of having fun at home, one that no other company or system can even dream of providing.
As I threw a virtual ball with my real arm to my black panther cub running around a forest glade on the screen in Kinectimals, I had the same thought as when the system tracked my entire body so I could master a yoga pose in Your Shape: Fitness Evolved by Ubisoft.
What kept echoing in my mind was the famous dictum of the author Arthur C. Clarke, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Most of the time Kinect simply feels like magic.
