The Kinect is now on sale in the UK and seems set to make a big impact this Christmas. I’ve seen a number of shops with ‘Kinect Sold-Out’ signs and Amazon are restricting orders to one per household so demand seems to be pretty high. It’s a good job as well, as Microsoft has a lot riding on their latest product which aims to usurp Nintendo’s Wii in user-friendly gaming.
If you’re not yet familiar with Microsoft’s newest bit of tech, the Kinect is an add-on for their Xbox 360 games console that removes the need for a handheld controller and employs the user’s body instead. Here’s the Kinect in action, with added Funky Town:
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The Kinect recognises movement, allows for voice command and can identify individual users through facial recognition, making for a lot of opportunity for a new breed of gaming and user-interface experiences. This has all lead to a mass of speculation about how this will change the gaming world (if at all) but I think that there’s also potential for marketers to utilise this living-room based, internet connected, face recognising, entertainment system.
And now for the wild speculative theories – As of today, an ever increasing number of people will have a camera in their living room that watches them while they watch the TV. It’s more than a bit Orwellian isn’t it?
At the moment users can watch movies and TV shows on their Xbox 360, but it isn’t outside of the realm of possibility for Microsoft to expand its multimedia catalogue to include actual TV channels. With advertising. And that’s where my wild speculation goes into overdrive because those adverts could be targeted to a ridiculous degree, based on the viewer’s age, sex, interests, where they live, the games they play, and the movies and shows they’ve watched. All the Xbox 360 needs to do is recognise who’s watching and show adverts that are optimised against their Xbox Live (Microsoft’s online service) profile.
Things could get even more intricate when taking into account that the Kinect can recognise more than one user, so it could identify that a couple are sat on the sofa, and insert the latest rom-com release into their ad break, along with ads for romantic weekend breaks. How will it know they’re a couple? Well, don’t forget that the Xbox 360 is also connected to your Facebook profile.
Oh and then there’s the fact that the Kinect camera can put a picture or video of you in the advert AND then there’s the opportunity for interactive adverts AND then there's the slew of valuable marketing data that could be gleaned. As you can see, there’s some serious potential in this bit of tech.
So brands will not only be able to follow you around as we discussed in this recent post, and project ads onto your eyeballs they’ll also be able to watch you at home as well. This could sound incredibly intrusive, but I’m not getting my tinfoil hat out yet. If I didn’t have to pay fees to watch content, the right privacy settings were in place and the ads were engaging and truly relevant then I, for one, would be more than happy to buy into it.
So what do you think? Could this happen, or have I fallen too far down the rabbit hole?
