I know the whole point of Kinect is to make your whole body become the controller but (as pointed out by many) for things like driving games it just doesn't work.

I can see a few advantages but many disadvantages.

In reality you will walk upto a car, have a look around, open the door and check out the interior, take a seat and then grab hold of the steering wheel, stick your feet on the pedals and drive off looking in the direction you wish to travel and not neccesarily the direction the car is currently going.

Given the E3 2010 preview of Forza 4 it appears that you can walk up to the car, check it out, open the door, check the interior. You can even look into the corners. However, you have to hold your hands in front of you to drive which makes you look like a muppet and must only give very limited sensitivity and control. You also have no pedals to speak of so the acceleration and braking has to be done by the game.

How about combining Kinect with a steering wheel and pedal set (or even a controller) so that you can still walk up to the car and look around it. You can still look into corners by glancing with your head (head tracking fron the Kinect) and you still have some sort of feed back and sensitive control and most importantly control of the braking and acceleration.

It makes a lot more sense to me to combine the Kinect camera and body tracking with the sensitivity and accuracy of some sort of handheld control.

This would also possibly allow control of games like COD or Halo. At the moment there is no real way to tell the game which direction you want your avatar to move. Why not combine the movement of the avatar with a controller and use body tracking to do things like jumping, ducking, throwing grenades, punching etc...

(This second one needs a bit more thought as I only just thought of it).

This would be different from the PS3 Move system as it is not using gyros and six-axis and controller tracking. It still uses body tracking but keeps the body tracking completely separate from the controller input. It still requires full body activity but also encorporates the accuracy of the controller.

You must have missed the video where they moved one foot forward/back to control acceleration and the other for the brake

Still, real controllers for me, it's a nice idea but doesn't transfer to what I play

better yet: just get a steering wheel/pedals. driving games are one of the few genres for which proper good quality peripherals already exist

That's what I said. Only combine it with being able to "look" around the car etc...

I said waaay back that for me Kinect needs to work with standard control methods to add to the overall experience rather than the "be the controller" system of the Wii-esque games.

I imagine playing an strategic FPS on my pad (Rainbow 6 / ARMA type) then opening the map but controlling it using some Minority Report hand business - zooming, scrolling, plaving markers, etc. Ok this is a simplistic example but that's my train of thought.

Exactly, it needs to augment the current user interaction rather than replace it completely.

just been watching some Bruce Lee videos on YT, wouldnt it be awesome if someone made a Kinect game based around martial arts? obviously you couldnt do throws, and weapons might be a little dangerous (unless they were soft foamy peripherals), but things like punches, kicks and blocks would be manageable, so long as the user had enough space to perform them. it would be like a full-body Wii Boxing

maybe you could get an acheivement for making Bruces sound effects too

It’s also an ergonomic nightmare - after a while, your arms will tire and you get what experts call “gorilla arm” – basically your arms will start to feel heavy and uncomfortable - even after you have put them into a rest position.

You could use it in FPS-type games I suppose.

Use the Kinect for Stand/Kneel/Prone, Lean and Run maybe?