Connecting with Kinect via Kinect Fun Labs

-- Musical Feet: FREE --

The eighth add-on for Kinect Fun Labs, Musical Feet is created by developer Smoking Gun and published by Microsoft Game Studios, Musical Feet supports HDTV in 720p and has in-game Dolby digital audio. There is no multi-player or co-op support in this single-player game.

Making music with your feet is a snap with Musical Feet -- you simply select a sound which can be a musical instrument, an animal, or even your own voice, and then dance across the giant virtual keyboard on screen, and voila! You are making music! Your creations can be shared with your friends and family online, though you should bear in mind that to play Musical Feet you will need a minimal play space in front of the Kinect measuring about seven-and-a-half feet (roughly around 3 meters). Musical Feet includes 7 Achievements worth a total of 50 Gamerscore points, including:

-- Glissando! (5 G) Perform a Keyboard Slide

-- I'm Famous! (5 G) Share with KinectShare.com

-- Look, I'm a Musician (5 G) Share with friends

-- One Man Band (10 G) Play with every sound

-- Play a Duo (10 G) Play a custom sound with a friend (primary player rewarded)

-- Recording Artist (10 G) Record a sample and play it back with the keyboard

-- Rock Star (5 G) Create 10 videos

Each of the add-ins that we covered above showcase the different capabilities of the Kinect -- but Fun Labs itself contains a number of utilities and apps that you can use in addition to the add-ins to do things with your Avatar like Google Eyes, in which you can scan objects into Fun Labs to give them, well, Googly Eyes, and then play with them. You can scan yourself to create a more accurate to you Avatar, and scan your body using "Kinect Me," or scan some objects using "Build a Buddy" to name just a few. Each of the apps available for Fun Labs functions as an individual gadget that focuses attention on a different aspect of the Kinect and its functionality, which offers gamers the chance to get to know the Kinect and what it can do for them.

Like a lot of value-added gaming tech, the Kinect is only as useful as the use it is put to -- use that is obvious when you are slotting a Kinect-required game, but perhaps not so obvious when you are using a Kinect-enabled game -- which it seems a lot of gamers who own a Kinect often forget that they can use when playing the latter. Often the Kinect-enabled games remind gamers that they can use Kinect by either including a notice or menu choice or, more often, by having one or more Kinect-based Achievements in the game. Still for purely Kinect capabilities type of exploring, Kinect Fun Labs is where the action is at!

With the bulk of the add-in gadgets being free, taking a few minutes to use the utilities in Fun Labs to explore the app, or create a custom Avatar that looks just like you because it is, or to try out the object scanning utility to scan in one of your favorite objects and perhaps make an avatar out of it, or to play with the add-ins as they were intended to be used, for recreation and fun... That sounds like fun to us. Either way, Kinect Fun Labs will point the way for you to have some fun with your Kinect once you download the base app and add-ins, which you will find on the Xbox LIVE Marketplace right now.