Tsunoda, Bleszinski "fricking love" Kinect Funlabs for developers, embrace homebrew
At a developer roundtable after Microsoft's E3 press conference yesterday, the Kinect division's creative director Kudo Tsunoda detailed how developers can get their work into Kinect Funlabs, the shareware and hacking addition to Kinect's service suite announced at E3 yesterday.
Developers will be able to share and vote on each others' experiments via kinectshare.com, with the most popular submissions making it onto Xbox itself.
“There's so much innovation out there on the web that creators and universities have been playing with, and it really hasn't been coming to Xbox yet,” he said. “[Kinect Funlabs] is giving everybody in the Kinect community an opportunity to bring their experiences to a place where people can actually interact with them.
“We're going to start running contests letting everybody who's creating stuff for Kinect get voted on by the community as to which of those things should come across to Funlabs. It's making a community out of all the developers – whether it's game developers or independent creators – and players, and bringing them all together in one place via kinectshare.com.”
Tsunoda pointed out that it's often years before we see the technological innovations that hardware developers are able to manufacture. Kinect was being experimented with internally for years before it got to the stage where it could be brought to the market.
“The great stuff with Kinect Funlabs is getting all of those innovations in front of people as soon as possible.”
Epic design head Cliff Bleszinski also chimed in with support for Funlabs, praising the Kinect division's attitude towards homebrew. “I fricking love the way you guys are embracing this homebrew hacking community instead of trying to fight it,” he said.
“I think it's so hard to leverage that, and they're doing such good things. And that finger-tracking is s**t-hot, as well.”
Funlabs was announced at Microsoft's presser this morning, and is available on Xbox 360 from today.