The big question is when do we see this in a real product. Many interesting innovations have come out of Microsoft research. It will be nice if they reach end users as well
True, but the Kinect is poorly implemented. I find the Kinect incredibly frustrating and usually have it unplugged. When you're watching a show that has a lot of dialogue it will interpret the talking from the show as commands. These commands include things like "Fast forward 40x" or "Rewind 20x".
Interesting -- I've never had that happen. You may want to recalibrate the microphones on your Kinect; it does some crazy analysis to filter audio from the speakers out from the input stream.