The motion camera must be able to detect the floor, as it’s crucial to many titles and the technology. Best avoid ”noisy” placements like subwoofers.
”We rely on the floor for a number of different parts of the technology,” said Kinect product manager Mark Plagge in a set up video, viewable below.
”You’ll see when the sensor first boots up that it actually does this tilt down, and what it’s doing is it’s looking for the floor plane. Titles use the floor plane as a point of reference for the skeletons as they’re moving throughout the title.”
”The floor plane becomes very important, so if you have a very cluttered floor with clothes all over the place and we can’t get a good look at the floor - it’s a great thing if people can clean that up and move things out of the way,” he continued.
It’s best that Kinect be placed in the horizontal middle of your television at either the top or bottom for the best results, providing this doesn’t sit too near a speaker.
”The other thing is that you want to put as much distance between you and the sensor as possible,” said Tian Lim, so placing it ”higher up actually tends to put an extra foot between you and the sensor,” explained the director of Kinect development.
”The ideal play space starts about six feet away from the Kinect sensor. Some games will need you to move side to side quite a lot, so you’ll want to know there are three-to-four feet on either side of you.” Even lighting is another thing to keep in mind.
”To have really bright lighting in one spot and really dark lighting in another spot: as you move between the two you might actually look a bit different to the sensor,” says Kareem Choudhry, it’s ”a little bit harder for us to keep track of you throughout the play space.”
So that’s a clean or at least tidy floor space, a good 6ft between you and the sensor, not place anywhere too noisy like on your Xbox 360 console or near a subwoofer and turn off those super bright spot lights in the living rooms.
Kinect releases November 10th in the UK for £130.
