- Image via Wikipedia
A lot of people have heard of the new Kinect from Microsoft. And that’s great, because they have been all but bombarding everybody in the modern world with the message about the thing for several months now. If you want to get a pretty decent workout but hate to go to some gym or outside to do so, this can be a nice little compromise between a technology craving and a desire to flex a little bit. A body in motion tends to stay alive longer, as the old saying goes. But did you know that, like almost everything else in this world, the Kinect is not that new of an idea? Believe it or not, it has a lineage which goes back to when Microsoft was still growing like a weed.
Back in the early 1990s, there was a device put out by Sega for its Genesis system. Known as the Activator, it used infrared beams to track where you were moving, and put a whole new shine on fighting games. Unfortunately, it suffered from a few setbacks which the designers of that era simply could not reconcile. The world just was not ready for the movement based games that are becoming more and more common place today. However, it is definitely for the best that such an attempt was made back then.
Some people say that the average baby tries to walk (or even to get up into a crawl) hundreds of times before they finally succeed in doing so. While some scientist somewhere has probably studied infants to the point where they know exactly how many tries it takes to learn how to take those first wobbly steps, the point is that falling down is not that big of a deal. The problem happens when someone tries to do something, falls down and just assumes that it can’t be done. It’s a good thing Microsoft does not think that way, isn’t it?
