It therefore goes without saying that I have yet to obtain the Kinect and so am unable to write an accurate personal account of the device, however I have read a lot of blogs and watched many YouTube reviews on it from the States.

All the reviews I read or watched where incredibly interesting, however the more I read or watched, the more I started to develop a concern surrounding the Kinect. There are obviously, as with all new devices launched onto the market, good points and bad points, but the point I have picked up on has not yet been covered, not to the best of my knowledge.

Movement is obviously the main feature of the Kinect, there is no controller, so even simple things such as navigation of the menu, appears to require a Minority Report style gesture of the arm. So I quickly concluded, that for someone like me with a spinal disability, the Kinect is going to be useless. I totally understand that there is a voice command option which is fantastic, but when it comes to the reason you would buy the Kinect, game playing; most, if not all the release games require quite a lot of jumping and movement. With the likes of the Wii and Sony Move, you still have a controller and so can manipulate game play with arm and hand movement. There are of course people in a much worse situation than me in so much as disability level, and so this community of gamers will be left out and not catered for.

As I have already mentioned, the Kinect has not yet been released in the UK, so if I am wrong regarding my assumption, and you know of some disability setting within the Kinect, then please correct me. However from what I have seen on the internet about the Kinect, nobody has touched on this subject. Before I leave this post I must admit this to you all. If this device had been released prior to me sustaining my spinal injury whilst serving in the British Army, very selfishly, I would not have even thought about this aspect of the Kinect. It is only because I find my self in this situation that I pick up on these little things much quicker and to be honest I feel quite ashamed of myself for this. It goes to show that I only really used to think of myself and not other people around me, however things have changed and I hope I am becoming a much more aware person of other peoples needs.