Admittedly, what I'm about to talk about is more "Nerd" than "Fitness," but I think it's a game changer in the world of home exercise, so you should know about it. This weekend, Microsoft announced the Kinect, an Xbox 360 peripheral that sits on your TV and uses IR to sense all movement in your living room. When used with a game, it'll track 48 points on the bodies of up to two players.
In other words, your entire body becomes the joystick.
Wii is currently the go-to console for active gaming, but you're still stuck anwering to the little wand or pad. Kinect should open things up. The device launches in November and, already, Ubisoft has announced a fitness program, Harmonix has a hip hop dancing game on deck, and LucasArts has - wait for it - a lightsaber fighting game.
Here's a bunch more intel from Gizmodo.
They had me at lightsaber battling, but I can't wait to see the home fitness programs that come from that. I don't think it's a stretch to think that they'll be coming out with workout titles where the trainers on the screen sense your fitness level and increases/decreases difficulty as needed. They'll probably even be able to correct your form. Wild.
Usually, this is the point in my posts where I make some smart-ass comment, but I'm just waaaay too geeked-out right now to do that. I'm going to go re-categorize my comic book collection and try to chill out a little.
I've been hearing about this for a while! It seems pretty sweet, especially if there is lightsaber fighting involved. As much as I'm excited about the fitness programs, it makes me nervous because I'm pretty sure that my fitness career could become obsolete by things like this. We'll just have to wait and see, I guess!
ReplyDeleteYeah, Kinect is going to be way freaking cool. Video games wouldn't contributing to the obesity problem if we were up moving around to play them.
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