Kotaku
Microsoft was kind enough to send me an Xbox 360 Vision Camera on Friday. It's a cute little thing that plugs into the USB port of your Xbox 360. I had a chance to mess around with it over the weekend, though I'm still waiting for Totemball to come out so I can really put this thing through the wringer.
The camera's design matches the sleek vanilla look of the console and even has a green ring of light to show when it's transmitting a signal over the Intertube.
I still haven't figured out where to put the camera in my entertainment center, but fortunately it has a fairly long cable, so I should be able to put it just about anywhere in my set-up.
After plugging the camera into the console I hopped over to the setting's blade where I was able to adjust for the type of room and the lighting. After you set up the camera, you can manually fine tune the focus by twisting a ring around the camera lens.
Next, I hopped over to my Gamertag settings where I was able to take a picture to use as my personal Gamer photo. Again, the process was fairly straightforward. The camera supports two levels of zoom, though by the second one the image is pretty grainy. Instead of just zooming automatically, the software lets you drag a box around the screen to highlight what you want to zoom in on.
After taking the picture, you can add effects to the image. The end result was a fairly grainy image of me. Even after I tried walking up to the camera and taking the picture without the zoom, I found it to be a bit on the grainy side.
I didn't get a chance to video chat with anybody, but I did play a few games of Uno with the camera on. What this did was replace my normal gamertag picture with a live video stream. While this did make the image a bit bigger, it was still way too small to really see any sort of emotions or such. I mention this because there's no way you could use the camera as a way of judging if someone is bluffing in Uno. I hope when it's introduced for poker they manage to clean up the stream and make the image much larger.
The people I was playing with in Uno did say that the video seemed relatively lagless, which was nice, but I'm still unclear why you'd want to have video streaming in a game of Uno.
While I think it will be neat to check out some of the games that Microsoft is going to be releasing specifically for the camera, I sorta had my fill of those with the Playstation 2. What I'm really excited about is the in-game face technology. I didn't really mess around with that much on the few games that did that with the Eye Toy and I'm assuming the technology has improved a bit since then.
I'm not sure if I would rush out a buy this camera when it hits on Sept. 19 (Oct. 6 in Europe). I think I'd likely wait until a good shooter came along that supported it and perhaps a few of my friends or family got the camera.
The camera is going to come in two flavors: For $40 you get the camera, one-month of Live Gold, a 360 headset and Uno and TotemBall. For $80 you get the same thing plus q year of Gold membership, a copy of Robotron and 200 Microsoft points.
What do you think, are you planning on buying the camera when it hits? I'll slap up a short video a bit later today showing me annoying people by inability to video myself and play Uno at the same time.
