Dean Takahashi goes Gaga for Microsoft’s Kinect (video)

MTV’s Dance Central is expected to be one of the hot titles for the Microsoft Kinect motion-sensing system launching on Nov. 4 for the Xbox 360.

The game makes use of Kinect’s ability to sense your entire body’s movement and translates that into the game. With Dance Central, you pick one of 32 tracks such as Lady Gaga’s Poker Face and then start mimicking what the characters do on screen. As many as three players can dance at the same time. The game is a lot like Dance Dance Revolution, but you don’t have to stomp on a pad and the game measures how accurately your whole body moves.

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As Microsoft’s Kinect creative director Kudo Tsunoda said in an interview, you can enjoy this kind of game even if you’re not a game player, or, as you can see if you watch the first video of me below, you’re not a good dancer.

Kinect has a 3D depth-sensing camera that can figure out where your body in a room and then maps your movements into the console. Microsoft hopes that the $149 Kinect will outgun the Nintendo Wii and Sony PlayStation Move during the holiday season. The company is spending a huge amount on marketing Kinect in the hopes of expanding the appeal of the Xbox 360 to the same kind of mass market that the Wii has.

As you can see from the videos below, you can play the game in easy mode (my video), medium, or hard (the expert video). We both danced to Lady Gaga, and you can tell I don’t quite have what it takes to dance in step.