Today’s post comes courtesy of Martin House, deployment manager at MindLeaders
There’s a growing buzz in the internet rumour mill about Microsoft having found their “golden reason” to upgrade to Windows 8 – built in connect. Microsoft recently announced Kinect for windows and the buzz is that this will be built in to some windows laptops, netbooks and probably even tablets.
What does this mean? – Well, here’s a scenario.
Imagine, if you will, standing at the front of an audience to run a presentation from a box with Kinect built into your Windows 8 Operation System with Metro. Changing page could be as simple as waving at the laptop, or imagine selecting a video through a mixture of voice and pointing at it on the screen. No actual touching needed.
The World of Minority Report style interfaces could be approaching far faster than we thought possible…
The next obvious question is – would manufacturers get behind it? Apart from the point that someone obviously already has as demos are currently being leaked, there is a huge upside for manufacturers. Recently, the necessity for consumers to upgrade their OS has been less than overwhelming. It’s certainly nice to have the newest processor, more ram and a fast SSD hard disk but it’s hard to justify a new laptop on just those grounds.
Kinect would change all that – it adds a new, and very sexy, feature to Windows. What sales agent worth their salt wouldn’t want to wow their customers with the latest tech to show they are ahead of the game? For those of us with kids (or technavore partners) the “I need it” factor is huge. New hardware for Christmas isn’t then just a “nice to have” but becomes a “if you loved me you’d get me a Kinect equipped laptop” scenario.
So will manufacturers get behind this? In the words of Sarah Palin, “You Betcha!”
As for my opinion – if this comes off this could well be a game changer and is certainly going on my Christmas list if I haven’t saved enough pennies to get one at launch.
