Thinking of getting a Kinect for a toddler

[carborundum]

My daughter is almost two an dloves jumping up and down. I think she'd love being copied by an avatar and have a great time playing stuff like that Double Fine game where you jump around bursting balloons.

Does anyone have any experence of this? And do you know if I can buy a second-hand one, or are they all registered and non-transferable or whatever?

Thanks folks :-)

[avidreader514]

carborundum wrote:

My daughter is almost two an dloves jumping up and down. I think she'd love being copied by an avatar and have a great time playing stuff like that Double Fine game where you jump around bursting balloons.

Does anyone have any experence of this? And do you know if I can buy a second-hand one, or are they all registered and non-transferable or whatever?

Thanks folks :-)

I wouldn't buy a Kinect for a toddlers. The skeleton-detection on the Kinect is pretty iffy with full-sized adults...it will lose track of fast-moving children very quickly. And believe me, it's not fun convincing your child to stand still so the Kinect can confirm the detection.

[Kalshane]

Yeah. We have a Kinect and it took us a lot of time to get our then-4 (now 5) year-old to hold his hand in the correct position long enough to get the game to recognize him, and to select the different options to get the game started. (I have no idea why you can't set the Xbox to save to the hard drive by default).

My son really enjoys playing the Kinect games now, but it was a steep learning curve to get him going.

[Jessica Price]

So, full disclosure, I was on the Kinect launch team, so I'm probably biased, but while skeletal tracking is better for adults than small people, you can set it up height, angle and lighting-wise to track kids pretty well. But most of the kids I remember testing it with were four or older.

So if it were me, I'd wait a couple years. (I believe they're continuing to improve the tracking, however.)

[carborundum]

Thanks folks, I appreciate the advice. I'll hold off and go buy a hundred sticker books instead. She'll love that even more, probably :-)

[LazarX]

Remember when buying for kids that young... short attention span is the rule. Better to get several cheaper toys than one expensive one.

[wicked cool]

I find the kinect to be a big pain. Maybe its me though. Based on the size of the living room (tv to couch less than 6 feet away0)the kinect only give us a small space to stand in and was constanly recalibrating the camera. I bought the small room adaptor and it didnt improve it all. Has anyone else had this problem?

[organized]

Regular Nintendo Wii might be a better choice. Just avoid all the shovel ware games.

[Lochmonster]

The Kinect needs SPAAAAAAACE and lots of it!

You'd need a good size room both length and depth wise if you want to do more than one person in front of it at a time.

I'm pretty tall (6'4") and I barely "fit" onto the sensor of ours, mostly due to the limitations of the small apartment. If you have a big living or game room you should be fine.