"Gesture motion tracking has never been this fun!" —Véronique Brossier
Overview: Kinect.me was created to complement the Kinect for Xbox 360 global tour, giving consumers the chance to share their first Kinect experience with others online and to experience the game before it was for sale. The site showcases real-time reactions from people using the game, giving them a chance to share personal stories, not just product stories. As a result, the videos and quotes featured on the site serve as strong testimonials and proof that "trying is believing." The navigation is a seemingly endless scrolling wall of videos, featuring everyone who went to the tour.
• Initial concepting for the Kinect campaign started in February 2010, production began in May and the site launched July 27, 2010.
• All of the files and applications on the backend are hosted on the Windows Azure platform; providing access to the files to site visitors all over the world on a high availability cloud solution made hosting and localization more scalable and easier to deploy.
• The average time spent was 6:88 minutes per visit; over 40,000 videos were recorded globally; and 21 percent of all videos that were viewed were shared (95 percent were shared on Facebook).
Comments by Stephen Clements:
Was the topic/subject of the project a new one? "Kinect is an amazingly innovative product. When we first tried it our jaws dropped and we realized that there wasn't much messaging required. The product is secondary to the experience. Our idea was to simply showcase the experience—'The Kinect Effect.'"
What was the most challenging aspect of the project? "When capturing video through on-site Web cams, quality can be particularly difficult to refine, so we had to find a balance between the video quality and file size that wouldn't hinder the site experience. We consulted with the demo tour agency (Sparks) to enact a series of tests and refinements to video capture hardware and device drivers in order to reach an acceptable level of quality. Because the global tour was executed by another agency, we also had to coordinate efforts to ensure proper capture and delivery. Each Kinect Tour installation needed the right equipment and technology and any variance made a significant impact on the video capture process (for example, we had to ensure that the guest pass number was part of the LiveCast server and that the appropriate Web cam hardware was purchased in all countries). We also had to provide a way for these mobile tour installations to maintain broadband-level connections to the Internet no matter where they were located. We purchased several broadband bonding service appliances from Mushroom Networks that aggregate up to four USB broadband modems from various data providers into one higher capacity Internet connection."
How did this project compare with others you're worked on in the past? "It's the technology that brings this idea to life. There is a humming engine of gadgets and gizmos that powers the content collection and distribution. The trick, as always, is giving the technology relevancy. People don't expect to see it, they just want it to make sense and as marketers we want it to say something. The Kinect Effect really sells people on the idea that Kinect is an experience worth sharing—and the videos let them do that."
