As an owner and active user of the Kinect, I was excited when Microsoft announced and released Kinect Fun Labs during their E3 2011 press conference yesterday. I immediately wanted to try out Kinect Me, an application in which you scan yourself to build an Xbox Live avatar, and compare it to the avatar that I built myself using their premade face parts and clothing. I was too busy watching live streams of E3 yesterday to do it then, but today I threw on one of my several Whiskey Media shirts and compared the two.
Here's the avatar I had before (changed my clothes and hair to something closer to what I expected the scan would be. My hair is like that since I chose to watch Nintendo's conference instead of showering):
and here's the avatar made in Kinect Me:
While it captured my "I'm a Wizard" shirt and black jean shorts pretty well, it did a horrendous job with my face. For most of you who don't know what I look like, I most certainly don't look anything like a Mexican middle-schooler who opts not to shave his shitty preteen moustache just because he's the only kid that can grow one. Oh, and on the closeup, it looks like I have some sort of horrible skin disease. At least it wasn't as bad as this one report where a white guy with good complexion got turned into a black guy with terrible acne.
This was actually my second try, and the lighting and setup seemed fine, but this is what I got. That's not the most disappointing part, though. Maybe I missed something during the press conference, but I thought I could actually use this as my avatar, when instead all I can do is record a short photoshoot and upload the video to KinectShare.com. I mean, I can certainly understand why they wouldn't let people use their scans as their public avatars, but I still hope it is something we can do in the near future.
There was one neat surprise, though: achievements. Yep! You can totally unlock eight achievements for a total of 50 Gamerscore. They're super easy, too. I thought that was kind of weird.
Now I'm going to go scan myself naked; I'll be sure to post up pics later.