Kinects future

Watching this video on kinect - Gizmodo by MS Engineers, the description of the multi-echo cancellation sound array struck a chord with me. This is the same-ish technology which is used in the lifesize video-conferencing system we have at work (which is awesome). It is clever enough to pick up even whispers around the room and it does this by identifying the location of each speaker and doing some clever maths to isolate each of the voices. Couple that with its motorized optical processing that does full stereoscopic depth-of-field analysis and tracking and you have some pretty interesting tech ripe for exploitation.

Games will drive a lot of innovation, but I would be surprised if this stays just in the Game arena. For example, ehat would kinect for video-conferencing give you. Well it might give you the ability to do Snow Crash avatar-based conferencing (the novel that inspired Second Life - don't be put off by that though the book is worth a read).