Kinect isn't dead. Meet the developers keeping motion gaming alive

WIRED speaks with indie developers committed to Microsoft's Xbox One peripheral
Virtual Air Guitar

Aki Kanerva and Ilkka Kalliomäki aren't just any indie game developers. The Finnish duo is dedicated to motion gaming and, as studio Virtual Air Guitar, one of the few companies still making Kinect games in 2016.

The pair's latest game is Kung-Fu for Kinect. Available now for Xbox One, the game is a comic-book inspired scrolling beat-'em-up that lets you kick, punch, and - most importantly - backflip your way through hordes of evil ninja. And, much to our surprise, it's really fun. So has the gaming public simply got the Kinect all wrong?

Ilkka Kalliomäki and Aki Kanerva are keeping the flame of Kinect gaming alive.Matt Kamen

"I wouldn't say the entire market has rejected it – the hardcore gamers have rejected it," Kanerva told WIRED. "But there's a lot of new people who have Xbox One who never had a chance to try out the old Kinect, a new generation of owners, and the older generation who now have kids. People want to play games with their kids, but are you really going to play Call of Duty with a nine-year old? No, you're going to want something that's fun for both the parents and the kids."

"I have to admit, one of the reasons why the initial Kinect wasn't received well was because many of the launch games just weren't very good," added Kalliomäki. "People ported existing games onto Kinect, and that just doesn't work."

"You have to design from the ground up, with Kinect in mind. Instead of triggering actions with a game pad, you have to design a flow of motion, how to keep the player in motion at all times, instead triggering pre-set actions."

Despite its 'violence', Kung-Fu for Kinect is cartoonish. You are mapped into the game and your real-world flailing takes out enemies on screen. Swing both arms around your head and you'll pull off that aforementioned killer backflip (no actual backflips are required) while power-ups let you unleash Dragon Ball-style special moves. Despite this, it's more accurate than many Kinect games we've played, giving a rare sense of agency in the world.

Virtual Air Guitar

Perhaps this shouldn't be a surprise though - after all, Kanerva and Kalliomäki have been pioneers in motion gaming for more than a decade.

"We actually started work on motion games before there was Kinect. Back in 2005, we were working as researchers in computer vision and virtual reality," Kanerva said. "We were doing university research into virtual instruments and that kind of stuff and one of our prototypes was Virtual Air Guitar. You would wear a pair of orange gloves, step in front of a camera, and start doing air guitar motions and it would play back actual guitar music that would respond to your movements. It was a huge success for us, it got huge attention from New Scientist and Discovery Channel."

"We started thinking, 'OK, how do we commercialise this, how do we get this to everyone?'," Kanerva recalled. "We all love computer games, and we hadn't done that before but we realised video game consoles were getting pretty powerful. Guitar Hero was just coming out, peripherals were the big thing, and we really wanted to push the envelope of what it was possible to do with new input methods."

Microsoft launched the original Kinect in 2010, an add-on for the Xbox 360. Although it offered voice command and gesture controls for the console, it was largely seen as an expensive, unnecessary peripheral without the software to support it. Nowadays, the upgraded Xbox One Kinect is more capable and accurate than skeptics would expect, which improves what can be done with compatible games, and improves user experience in one key area - space.

"The field of view is a lot better, so you don't need as much space as you did with previous Kinect," said Kalliomäki. "That's the biggest thing, because space is always the problem, especially so in Europe where living rooms are smaller than in the US."

Virtual Air Guitar

However, although the Xbox One - somewhat controversially - launched with the new model Kinect bundled in, Microsoft removed it in June 2014. With the reveal of Xbox One S at E3 2016, Microsoft stepped further away from Kinect, revealing the new, slimline console would no longer house the physical port to connect Kinect. Instead, owners must use a USB adaptor.

So how does this affect developers making games for Kinect?

"Well, I can't say I'm happy with the unbundling, of course. But at the same time, I can see the point in not forcing it on the people who don't like it," Kalliomäki continued. "There's definitely a Kinect audience out there though, and there's not a lot of competition in that segment, so we are happy to keep Kinect alive. We'd love to see more developers, more indies, making fun, inventive stuff to keep the market alive. We know the big names aren't doing it, so it's up to us indies."

"It was a bit of a bummer to hear the Xbox One S wouldn’t have a Kinect port, even though you can get an adapter. On the other hand, the price is great, and we hope it'll help in getting more Xboxes out there," offers Kanerva. "Our selection of Kinect games keeps growing, and that means there'll be reason for new Xbox owners to look at getting a standalone Kinect. And, of course, there’s no word yet on Project Scorpio. It certainly has the size and power to support Kinect."

"We're also very enthusiastic about the Chinese market," Kanerva said. "Kinect is being received very well there – possibly because they never had the uneven selection of Xbox 360 Kinect games. We already have Boom Ball out in China, with the rest of our games to follow. The Chinese market won't support us entirely, but all of these things do matter in letting us make motion games."

Virtual Air Guitar

And if Microsoft was to ever pull support for Kinect entirely? The team says it would still be committed to motion gaming.

"If it became impossible for us to do Kinect games, we wouldn't do regular games, we would do something else with motion control," said Kanerva. "That's where our expertise lies – we know what works and what doesn't in motion control."

"We've already done outsourcing projects for big companies like Intel RealSense, too. We're always looking for new areas or markets where we can do something with our expertise. So if Kinect was no longer supported at all, we would do something else, maybe in the medical area or sports, exercise."

Kalliomäki added, "It's the kinds of games we can do well. This is our fifth Kinect title, so we've worked through the hard parts of developing for it, and now we think that we can actually make good games for Kinect!"