As soon as Microsoft announced that one of the upcoming Xbox 360 accessories would be a ‘webcam’ reactions were mixed. Some people feel that Microsoft are just copying the eye toy from Sony but to be honest, who cares. Sure, most of the games that use gesture recognition or face mapping have been pretty lame, but that’s mostly because the technology to do it has trailed the developers grandiose ideas.

Sure, Playstation fans have been able to map their face into AFL Live or watch themselves performing bad Karaoke with Singstar, but really, apart from some cute gimmicks for the kids, without the eyetoy chat, at an extra expense, there isn’t a great deal of stuff that you can do with it out of the box. We’ve been pretty keen to see just what the Live Vision Camera has to offer, so thanks to Rob from Spectre World, we managed to get our hands on one of these hot little items.

For just over $50 (its RRP is $59.95 but online its around $52-$55) you get a pretty good kit. You get the camera itself, one month of Xbox Live Gold, one of the new white Xbox Live Headsets and also an unlock code for the Live Arcade game, Uno. Pretty decent value. After getting out the Jaws of Life to break open the standard plastic packaging (grrr) and plugging the camera in to your Xbox 360 (there’s a handy USB slot on the back just above the power) that’s all there is to it. No setup to run through, nothing. As soon as you plug the camera in, you’ll notice the background of the Xbox 360 interface start displaying a rippling version of what the camera is seeing.

To confirm that things are working normally, heading to the ‘System’ blade in the Xbox 360 menu has an option called ‘Xbox Live Vision’ which gives you a live feed through the camera that helps you find a good spot and align it to get your best angle. And that’s it; you’re all set to send images to people on your friends list or video chat with other camera owners. It was disappointing to find out that only one on one video chats are available though and hopefully this limitation can be looked at because if you’ve got the bandwidth to handle it, it’s unfortunate that the hardware itself could be the limiting factor. There are a few options available to adjust according to the lighting conditions in your room, or personal preference, but I found that just leaving them all on Auto did a great job with no need for tweaking at all except for a small focus adjustment.

The game included with the Live Vision Camera, Uno has been around a while now but is definitely still popular so finding people to test your camera out with shouldn’t be a problem. Instead of your Gamer Picture being your ‘Online Avatar’ now people on your friends list will see a video feed of you which can be cool, or depending on how twisted your Live Friends are, or how ugly you are, altogether embarrassing. Tests with some people on my friends lists gave varying results no doubt depending on everyones connection, ranging from fine, to satisfactory, to downright poor once the in-game options were tweaked with and some digital zoom applied. Luckily there was no such issue with the one on one video chats during our testing. If you regularly change your Gamer Picture as well and wondered what the difference between your Gamer picture and Personal picture was well wonder no more.

Now you can take a photo with the Live Vision Camera to use as your Personal Picture. This image becomes your Xbox Live avatar, but is only visible to people on your friends list. Throw on your Sunday best, stand on your head, hold up your kid sisters barbie doll, throw a full moon.. whatever.. the choice is yours and there's even a bunch of special effect filters that can be applied to the image. Actually one cool tip I can share is that I find it easier writing messages on paper and sending a picture of it instead of using a controller to type text messages, plus it has the personal hand written touch ;-)

There are more games coming out that make use of the Live Vision camera. Totem Ball, is a free game available on the Live Arcade that makes use of gesture recognition. You steer a little character called Pterry the Pturtle across various maps collecting musical totems and take part in a bunch of other cool diversions such as pinball and juggling. Personally I found controlling the little critter quite tricky and holding your arms up, keeping your hands inside the area onscreen needed to control Pterry gives you pretty sore arms after a while. Still, it’s fun in doses, and free to download (40mb).

Coming soon from Ubisoft, Rainbow Six Las Vegas will give Xbox owners their first taste of face mapping technology and let you put your own face on your multiplayer character in the game. Sure, it’s only new to Xbox owners but it should be cool and nice little gimmicks such as that help sales no doubt. Time will tell, and a big test will be if Australian "broadband" can deliver the bandwidth needed in a quality video feed to gamers Australia wide as people on my friends list range in location from W.A to Southern Victoria, NewCastle to Brisbane and no doubt i'm not alone. But if anything, the user activated 'vibration' could help sell a few cameras anyway ;-)

Thanks again to Spectre World for the review unit.