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XBOX Live Vision Camera
Microsoft's first venture into gesture-based gaming. Is it a hit or a miss?

Labeled With  Live Vision Camera XBOX Live XBOX 360
Written by Josh Lowensohn on Wednesday, October 11 2006


Totemball was the first “wow” experience I had with the camera. While the game itself just makes me want to pick up a controller for aggravation’s sake, the proof of concept with gesture gaming is definitely there. In Totemball, you’re basically rolling around, collecting pieces of yourself to grow higher in addition to picking up multipliers and point items. The game is controlled by holding your hands up (in the perennial “touchdown” position) to control four-directional movement. While the concept is neat, I spent most of the game either feeling the pain of lactic acid building up in my arms, or getting frustrated in the simple inability to go where I wanted to go in what is ultimately an incredibly simple game. I will give kudos to the pinball bonus levels though, as they’re incredibly fun and super intuitive. Just like regular pinball, moving the hand on that side of the machine activates the correct bumper, so right away you’ll know how to play.

Some other features Microsoft plugged in to the Vision cam are the 360 music player visualization integration and the PC compatibility. The visualization integration is pretty cool, although it just appears to give a shadowy outline of any movement it picks up which blends in with whatever other visualizations are going on. Some more color or filter effects would have been nice, but it’s nice to see the integration in there. The PC integration is supposedly simple with plug-and-play, but my fairly recent Dell with the latest version of Windows XP spent about ten minutes looking for the drivers online before saying the hardware was ready to use. Furthermore, attempting to edit or tweak any of the preferences wasn’t happening, so for me at least, the drivers didn’t seem to work completely. Because of this, I also couldn’t use the cam with Trillian or AIM, but I’m assuming some updated drivers will fix this. As far as Mac compatibility goes, it was recognized by iChat, but upon trying to start it up just gave me an error message saying the camera was in use by another program.

Despite the connectivity problems I had, and the frustrating Totemball experience, the Vision cam is a pretty good value as far as 360 accessories go. Not counting the headset and included software, you’re basically getting the cam for less than twenty bucks, which is great considering you can use it on things besides the console (in theory anyways). However, I’d recommend holding off purchasing one until there’s some more compelling software to make use of it, as games of UNO and picture messages that are limited to the Live Gold members are hardly reasons to pick one up. The build quality is fantastic and the ring of light to let you know it’s on is truly cool. Plus the cord is long enough to snake across your living room or around your office door to spy on co-workers. As soon as Microsoft builds up the software both in games and Dashboard communication arenas, the Vision cam could be the next big thing.





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