Lets be honest most of us use our smartphones to call or text others, and seek information. Most hardcore games don’t play games on our phones because we play them at home on consoles or PCs. Now imagine if your Xbox, along with Kinect could also help you find information, taking away one of the smartphone’s greatest strengths. Many of us would be using our phones a lot less. Here is a summary of what apps we would like to see brought over.
For starters, we really need a weather app. After an intense night of gaming we can check in and see if it will be suitable to go outside the next day. If you’re one of those “goes outside” types. What better app to fill this niche than the popular iOS app, Swackett. Swackett not only provides a look at the weather but also suggests the type of clothing that would be suitable outdoors at the time. This would be perfect fit for Kinect. When we use the app it would tell us if what we were wearing would work outdoors and if it didn’t then it could suggest more appropriate clothing to the user to show what they should wear. Of course the app would have voice and motion control too just to make it a fully visceral Kinect experience.
Next we need a reminder type app much like Apple’s Reminders app. We’ve all had those moments when our significant other tells us to do something in the midst of our gaming and to no fault of our own we simply forget. Right? Anyway, what if we simply had Kinect record the request and set a time to remind the user to do it. This would avoid the fight that would undoubtedly come from not performing our task. Not to mention it would give us a solid frame of reference so we know when we’ve been gaming for longer than we thought. We don’t want reminders like the ones currently in Kinect games that appear every half hour or so to tell us a break but rather real-life reminders.
Every once in a while, each of us plays a multiplayer match where your team is actually playing as a team. It’s rare we know, but it does happen. Unfortunately this means that most of us have also run into the problem of having teammate not speaking the same language as the rest of the team. This could easily be solved with Kinect. All we would have to do is simply repeat the phrase they used and in the background Kinect would perform the translation. This feature could bolster communication, and provide your team with vital information that otherwise, you would not have received. It could be the difference between winning and losing the match. Plus, it helps out those kids in foreign language classes trying to get their homework done.
What would make Microsoft’s app service even better would be making it a truly open system, with developers having the ability to craft their own apps. It would keep Xbox Live fresh, with a constant stream of updates and apps flowing, hopefully sparking other peoples’ creativity. Everyone could benefit from something like this and as long as all of the apps are completely optional, they wouldn’t interfere with anyone’s standard routine.
