Kudo Tsunoda, General Manager for Xbox Kinect, took the audience at the Cannes Lions festival on a journey the path his team took to launch Kinect.

Originally, Xbox started off as a powerful gaming console for the 18-35 year old male, and Kudo and his team were asked to come up with a concept that would expand the audience, make Xbox more approachable, and more family friendly.

The development of Kinect included a method acting approach. In this approach they didn’t sit around a room and come up with ideas, instead they gathered a ton of data from consumers and worked to ensure their needs were integrated into their development.

I loved seeing the first user test of Kinect that featured a little boy named Noah. In the test Noah needed to figure out in under 30 seconds how to start playing a racing game without a controller. Noah figured it out quickly – in under 30 seconds, but what was great was seeing Noah’s mom interacting with his game play and then finally jumping in and playing the racing game.

Some of the features of Kinect that bring it to life include 3D depth mapping, a multi-ray microphone, RGB camera, tilt control, and a human recognition system.

These features, along with the method acting approach, has created a large consumer demand resulting in 10M sensors being sold, which makes it the fastest selling tech gadget in history.

Cheers and enjoy,

Jenny

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