If you look at the Smart TV landscape today

Microsoft’s Kinect platform didn’t just breath new life into the Xbox 360, it introduced a rapidly adopted way to interact with your television free of a controller. As we explore new ways that this same system can be used, a demonstration of how it could be implemented for use on Windows 8 offers a hint of what to expect from Kinect 2.0.

If you look at the Smart TV landscape today, you’ll see the effect Microsoft had with Kinect. Several companies are trying to implement an embedded voice and gesture solution into their living room experience right now. Samsung’s Smart TV line has an embedded camera that you can use to navigate, though it’s terribly crude when compared to Kinect. Google implemented voice search into their Google TV platform, which is great for the few people that still use it.

On a gaming platform, Kinect works well. In an environment like Windows 8, there’s a need for faster and more accurate methods of interaction than just holding your hand still in a specific place for a little while. It turns out that what Kinect really needed was to be able to pay closer attention to your hands.

Right now, your Kinect is about as aware of your hands as it is your kneecaps. when you open and close your fists, or wiggle your fingers around, the Kinect doesn’t pay attention to them at all. The three camera system deployed by the Kinect isn’t accurate enough to pick out your individual digits, so to your Xbox there’s just a densely packed mass at the end of your arm it can’t really do anything with.

The only thing the Kinect could detect with reasonable accuracy as you move around would be the difference between your hand when it was open versus when it was balled into a fist. By adding in this functionality, you gain something that feels much more like a click, which is needed for something like Windows 8.