Microsoft's Kinect may not be able to detect seated gamers, but it can make some educated about the age of gamers who are standing and put that information to good use.
Playing around with upcoming Xbox 360 Kinect game Joy Ride I asked the developers about playing the game with friends and children. They told me that the game can tell, based on the skeletal anatomy of a gamer, if they are children and then automatically adjust the difficulty.
What if, I asked, someone tried kneeling to cheat?
That won't work, I was told, because Kinect would notice that the player was missing the knee joints.
What if the player were a little person, or perhaps just really short.
That, could cause a misdetect, giving the shorter gamer the competitive edge in a race.
Curious. But I'm sure it's a feature you can turn off. Neat that the developers are playing around with ways to use this technology. I'm sure that's going to result in a flood of new ideas, some good, some bad.