Jennifer's 365 Project

Chris bought the Nyko Zoom online the other week and it arrived today. This little device is designed to snap onto the Kinect and magnify the lenses, essentially letting you use a slightly smaller area than required normally when playing.

Will be interested in trying it out over the next few days to see if it really does just that.

My parents and little brother arrived late morning today to celebrate Father's Day a day early. Chris and my mother discussed genealogy while my dad played a bit with Leki. I'm sure Leki enjoyed the attention, especially since he usually moves in on my dad who tries to avoid touching him due to cat allergies. But, armed with allergy medicine, my dad took on the cat in a playful round of batting.

Also, it appears several games on my ipad advanced in level thanks to Jeff's awesome gaming skills.
Anyway, we went out for some lunch then walked around the mall a bit since we were so close by. Not terribly exiting, but a change of pace. After that we headed back to our apartment where we introduced everyone to the Kinect.
I've played the Wii with Jeff, but never the Kinect, so today was a perfect opportunity to show him awesomeness. We have a few games for the Kinect, so we cycled through them, showing off various things it can do. My favorite is still Kinect Sports.

Jeff did manage to beat out any score I had on any game, just like he used to do when we were little. I don't know how he does it.

It's been pretty nice weather the last few days, including today. The sun was shining and the sky was pretty blue this morning. It's nice to have the sun shining and some of the snow melted (making it easier to walk around in work shoes downtown).

Oh, and the Casual Stroll to Mordor article I was working on for playing Lord of the Rings Online with Kinect is up. So check it out. There's even a video!

I spent a big chunk of the evening playing around with the Kinect and getting it working with Lord of the Rings Online. More specifically, capturing video of the two screens for a brief introduction and tutorial over at A Casual Stroll to Mordor.

So here's just a screenshot (because it's hard to take a photo of yourself) of about 15 minutes of video I captured that I now need to edit down.

Hooray for progress!

Update (2/16/2011): Please check out my post on using a Kinect & LOTRO at A Casual Stroll to Mordor for a detailed introduction and video.

So part of the evening I worked on getting the Kinect and Lord of the Rings Online to work together. I didn't take and photos but I did take a screenshot for keybinding reference.

It was mostly a much less successful attempt than World of Warcraft. I managed to kill a boar, but then launched the LOTRO store about a gazillion times. Still not sure how I did that since I didn't have a key bound for the LOTRO store....

More work this week. Hope to have a post up on Casual Stroll to Mordor in the next week or so after I get some kinks worked out.

This afternoon I decided to hook up the Kinect to my laptop and try getting an MMO working with it. Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO was having some server issues so I snagged the keybindings from FAAST's forums and booted up World of Warcraft (WoW).
The bindings are very basic - just an introduction. I plan on elaborating on them over the next week or so and trying both WoW again as well as LOTRO. I also need to figure out how to capture video with both the video game and the FAAST software (so far I've only managed to capture one or the other).

It does add a whole new level of game-play and I'm excited to play with the Kinect some more.
With the newly open living room space, I decided to try the Wii Fit again. It was sure to let me know I've been absent for a year and a half. Oops.

I spent a big chunk of the weekend bouncing around in front of the TV playing Kinect games, but the big reason I wanted one was for what you can do with it on the computer. There's a whole host of things out there since the Kinect went on sale, from shadow puppets to street mapping. What caught my interest was the application to desktop games. Specifically - MMOs.
So Chris and I spent about an hour fiddling with the Kinect. If you haven't taken a look at and read the page for the Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton (FAAST) you should. It's awesome and easy to set up. You can see a lot of potential for this.
So first thing after getting everything installed (FAAST, drivers, etc) was to try out hands at minesweeper. It's a little different moving forward and backward to navigate on the board, but it works. Originally we had it so if you jumped you'd click the square, but since we're on the 3rd floor of an apartment this quickly got changed to hand waving.

Here's just a quick snippit of what we did to the bindings.txt file:

lean_left 15 key left_arrow
lean_right 15 key right_arrow
lean_forwards 20 key up_arrow
lean_backwards 20 key down_arrow
wave 0 key enter

Just add that to the action tab and hit start input emulation!

Next up is creating a more robust list of actions for LOTRO.

It's been a different kind of day. First off, I slept in. I never sleep in. Even if I stayed up all night I still wake up no later than 7:30 thanks to a cat on a very strict schedule. Not today. Hello nearly 10am.

Plus I'm sore, like I did real exercise. I guess I kind of did yesterday with the Kinect and now my body has a Kinect hangover. Between the two of us we played about three hours of Kinect games yesterday and I've played about an hour again today. Really what this all tells me is that I'm not active enough, which I knew already. I don't like aerobics, dancing, yoga, etc. Toss a video game in the mix though and yeah, you can sell it to me better. Now the real trick is to see how long I stay interested. The only thing I've managed to maintain consistently is walking several miles every day. And that's mostly helped by the fact that I work downtown and walk everywhere.
It hasn't snowed much more today, but it's been very chilly out. Squirrels have stopped by a few times looking to see if we've put out any food. Mostly they've been disappointed, but the cat has been entertained by their comings and goings.

It's been a quiet day, which is nice for a Sunday. Chris even got to do another epic amount of link blogging today.

To me, the Kinect originally sounded interesting, it wasn't until I started hearing about FAAST and possibilities with that (plus Microsoft is going to put out their own official development kit shortly for the computer). Toss in 20% off one-day only coupon and I'm in!
So we headed out a little past midnight, figuring since the Kinect is normally hard to find with the coupon it might be even harder. We drove to two different stores but finally at a little past 1am we had a Kinect in hand and were headed back home. Given how crappy the roads ended up being today, I'm glad we opted to shop at midnight as opposed to noon.
Now, the long term plan is to use the Kinect more with the computer than the Xbox 360, but that doesn't mean we can't play with some Kinect games, right? So Chris and I played a few games together, and I messed around playing soccer and some other sports games by myself as well.

It's very similar to the Wii on a lot of things, but you can't fake movement as easily. With the Wii you can just flip your wrist back and forth - you don't actually have to move your whole body. Not so with the Kinect since it's watching your whole frame. I'm more impressed than I thought I would be. I agree with what Chris has to say about it.
The huge drawback with the Kinect is the amount of room it needs. We don't have a large living room - it's just barely big enough for the kinect after we move the coffee table. Barely. That's ok - we knew that before we bought it. Still, it's a little tricky for both of us to play at the same time. More so than with the Wii.

Leki, of course, loves the extra room on the floor. He couldn't stop rolling around in front of us while we played, snagging stray pant legs that got too close to his domain.