Moto On Tour

Over these past couple of weeks my final year project Moto has been on show for a few days in Bournemouth and London. It’s been an interesting experience and I’ve met some great people in some surprisingly different areas of expertise, but it’s really taught me a massive load about not just Kinect, but development in general.

Bournemouth

The first stop for the Interactive Media grad show was our home turf. Situated in Kimmeridge House at Bournemouth University, Launch 2012 housed not only us interactive media types but TV, Scriptwriters and Radio Production in one big creative lump showing off our past year’s work.

Saying that, Interactive Media pretty much took over the building with most of the downstairs and all of the upstairs dedicated to just our stuff. There was loads of awesome things from mobile AR to interactive video, stop-motion animations to web apps. Upstairs there were a couple of Kinect projects – Moto and Slugfest – which definitely got mixed reactions for many different reasons.

The Kinect Effect

I would like to think, after only ever living in Bournemouth and Northampton, that Bournemouth has become a bit of a tech hub if you will. Some awesome projects have come from this place and along with places like Bristol, London and quite a lot of the south coast and so it certainly has inhabitants that love tech in whatever form it comes in.

Then we’ve got the flipside – families. Bournemouth seems full of either old people or, failing that, 2.4 children type families. Interactive Media is definitely something that a lot of people use on a daily basis and with children growing up with this sort of thing in their life nowadays its becoming something a lot of people can enjoy and appreciate.

So really people were set up to love the Kinect projects. Thankfully, that was very much the case for the most part.

The vast majority of people who showed up to the Bournemouth show had little experience with Kinect. These guys were people interested in cool tech stuff, really, but had no real need to use a Kinect before. It’s a thing for the Xbox 360 that takes up their entire living room. They’re loving it. Even just seeing it in action, rather than my project. Seeing themselves being tracked by a computer without anything in their hands seemed to be a big seller.

There was a box on the floor that worked as the play area. Anyone who stepped in that the Kinect picked up. It’s a fairly big box and, humans being humans, if they see a project they wanted to see over the room they would just walk towards it going through it. Even just being picked up then was enough for people to come in and have a little go sometimes.

The concept of Moto seemed to go down pretty well too. Although there were two expectations from it – that it was a game, or it was a band simulation. It’s neither, but I can see why they expect that. Moto doesn’t really have a market to sell to as, put simply, there’s nothing to do on it apart from muck about. It’s like being charged to go on the swings at the play park.

Nonetheless, those who wanted a game to play on either had Slugfest or the vast array of other games to play on. Those who wanted a band simulator can, well, go join a band.

London

After a week or so of taking stock after what was a rather hectic past month, me and a bunch of other final year IMPs took our projects up to London to the rather spacious and idyllic offices of Dare.

Not quite so expected

Just before we left, though, I came across a rather unexpected surprise with Moto. Someone had downloaded and used Moto themselves. People I have no idea who they actually are. I know this as they took a couple of pictures and uploaded them to the website.

The weekend before going to London was – by the looks of things - pretty warm. It was also the time these people chose to have a go on Moto in their own living room. I had never really tested Moto in an actual living room setting as most people don’t really have a powerful enough machine to run Kinect stuff next to their TV. But apparently it works.

Moto is a bit of a pain to set up for Joe Public. Hey, it’s a pain to set up for me. But that’s the Kinect. Most of the time you don’t move the Kinect after you’ve attached it to your Xbox. But what these people had done is found Moto, downloaded it from the site, plugged the Kinect in to their computer correctly, installed the drivers, ran it and apparently managed to navigate the (admittedly finnicky) menu system to take a picture of themselves. Amazing.

It looks like they’re loving it too. So either it’s a massive troll by someone, or these people are the most awesome family ever. It shows Moto works outside the sterile confines of my room or a exhibition stand which is fantastic news to someone who’s never touched C# before, let alone Natural User Interfaces and thinking in 3D. Great news.

But anyway…

Heading to London

Carting all the exhibition stuff to London was never going to be an easy task, but we made it. We couldn’t set up the day before like we planned, so we did hit the pub like you would expect any student to do.

Came back Saturday to set the whole thing. It’s a shame the Kinect stuff can’t really go where the bulk of stuff is, but it just takes up far too much space. So instead it gets situated in a rather ideal little cubbyhole.

The amount of people coming to have a look seemed less, but who did turn up were industry professionals actually looking for people to hire. So it’s all serious business. The great thing about this industry is that they do know the importance of the work-life balance. We’re not robots. So the odd table football break is understandable.

Not the droids we’re looking for

Kinect is pretty new. At the moment, it’s only actually been in the hands of consumers for just under two years now and for amateur developers like myself even less time. It’s not the PC. It’s not the Web. It’s a completely new platform and it’s something there isn’t that much call for.

Sure industry people seemed interested in Moto, how it worked, and Kinect itself, but it’s not something people want to employ you for. That’s fine for me I’ve got a job doing some web stuff that starts in a couple of days and there were a few companies that seemed sad to see that which, y’know, pleases me. But there’s little call for a ‘Kinect guy’. Not wholly unexpected.

But there’s call for me to become an all-rounder. I definitely didn’t go into Kinect development because it’s something I saw myself doing on a daily basis. I found it great fun, sure, but I didn’t do it for that. I took this opportunity to try out something different from my normal stuff and it turned out great fun and it’s something I definitely want to pursue again. Even talking to the creator of the other Kinect project we managed to find a few ways we could develop for Kinect to make some serious opportunities for ourselves. I’m not going to stop doing it because I’m not going to be paid for it.

In short, Kinect development is awesome but there are no jobs out there for it – so make some yourself.

Our stay in London, while chilled, was great fun. Dare are great people not only for letting us use their offices for free but also just in general at table football. Beasts.

Now that’s it. Moto v1 is done, but it is by no means finished. I start proper work Wednesday, but that doesn’t mean Moto is finished. Some more Kinect projects? Sure, those too. We shall see.