The Kinect has made me lazy — and I like it

I was in the bathroom when I realized how much my TV-watching lifestyle has changed due to the Kinect.

When you think about it, altering living-room habits because of a new piece of technology is a very rare thing. It has to be good enough to overcome years or even decades of ingrained tendencies. That’s a high bar for a product to meet, and for me, Microsoft has accomplished this with version 2 of Kinect, the 3D motion-sensing and voice-recognizing camera for the Xbox One console. (I wonder what it will do for me by, say, version 5?) The Kinect can see and record quite a bit of what you’re doing — mostly to translate into onscreen actions like movement-based gameplay or menu navigation.