The Kinect excited me when it was announced, as it finally made Minority Report style motion control viable. The Milo demo was a bit creepy, but the rest was fantastic – finally I could lie idly on my coach waving my arms to play games!

There was one minor sticking point, however – all of the advertising for the game showed the Kinect working joyously in these wide open spaces. It looked great but the average gamer, particularly in the UK, doesn’t have a spacious living room that isn’t littered with coffee tables, boxes and chest high walls. Sure enough, when the Kinect was released, many gamers were disappointed to find that they had to clear out these obstacles to make their rooms Kinect-compatible.

The Nyko Kinect Zoom hopes to solve this problem through widening the Kinect camera’s viewing angle. This means you need less space to use the Kinect, and you can stand closer. There must be a trade-off with accuracy, but most small-roomed gamers should be quite willing to take that trade-off.

So how well does it work? The answer seems to depend mostly on how you set up your Kinect and which games you play. It seems to work best with a Kinect TV mount placed just under the television, with players standing as centrally as possible. If you have your Kinect sitting above your TV, the Zoom-equipped Kinect seems to have some problems tracking fine motions of the body.

In addition, games that require more precise motion tracking, particularly of the hands, seem to work slightly worse. Games that focus mostly on the overall movement of the body work quite fine, though. These include Kinect Adventures, Kinectimals, Dance Central and Just Dance.

Another issue is that games with more than one player seem to suffer slightly, due to the fish eye nature of the lens. Players on the periphery of the camera’s range appear to the sensor to be slightly curved, which can be misinterpreted by the game as being in an incorrect posture. Given that this is only an issue if you have an overly wide but shallow room, this shouldn’t affect the majority of users. Another side effect of the fish-eye lens is that there is a small dead zone in each corner, so controls in the corners can be difficult to activate at times.

Otherwise though, I have to say the Nyko Zoom works fairly well. If you’ve got the Zoom set up correctly and you’re willing to accept that not all titles are ideal for the system, the Nyko Zoom can dramatically reduce the size of the playing space required, and for that I give it a lot of credit. While flaws with the system do exist, I don’t think anything short of a complete overhaul of the Kinect camera or its supporting software could produce better results – no other Kinect accessories come close. And at the end of the day, if you only have four or five feet of space in front of your Kinect in which to stand, then this is an essential purchase.

TUS Rating:

4 of 5

This article was written by William Judd. William writes for Gaming Zap, the UK’s leading online retailer of Xbox 360 and Kinect accessories, including the Kinect Power Supply.