I swung by Wal-Mart on the way home hoping to find the XBOX Live Vision Camera accessory for my XBOX 360. Target didn’t have any in stock the day before. Sure enough, WallyWorld had at least four for $39. The kit came with an extra headset, 1-month of XBOX Live Gold (claim code), and UNO (claim code). I added the 1-month to my existing XBOX Live Gold Membership. I’m currently good through Jan 2008. I headed home to check this thing out.

Hooking up the USB camera was easy. I just plugged the camera into one of the front USB ports on the XBOX 360 and I was ready to go. No installation. No setup was necessary. This camera will also work with Windows XP and Windows Vista.

The camera comes with about 8-feet of USB cable. That’s enough to hide it behind and on top of your entertainment center or to run it across the floor to a table near you.

The first thing I noticed after plugging in the camera was that my XBOX 360 dashboard had changed. Semi-transparent in the background was a live feed from the camera. It filled up the whole screen and was about 95% transparent. Faint, but cool. A neat “hey I’m looking through water in motion” effect was applied to the image. Good job to Microsoft for showing a little UI style!

Next I hopped over to the System blade to look at the configuration settings for the camera. In there I could adjust the lighting the room and the exposure of the camera. This meant that I could adjust the camera for certain lighting situations like lots of light, dim lights, etc.

After tweaking the settings a bit, I hopped into my first video chat. I couldn’t find anyone on my XBOX Live buddy list with a camera, so I just video-chatted with a friend. Setting up a video chat is as simple as inviting someone to a game or inviting them to a private voice chat.

Once I sent the invite a live feed of my broadcast appeared on screen. Oddly enough, everything in my feed was mirrored. However, my buddy was able to see the non-mirrored feed. The video quality was great and only got blurred when there was a lot of motion on screen. During the chat I had options to pause the chat and zoom into the image. The zoom feature added about a 3x zoom to the image. Only one level of zoom was offered and I took a hit in picture quality each time I did it.

The camera has a manual focus. Just rotate the camera lense on the front of the camera to adjust the focus.

I then went in to adjust my gamer picture. With the latest update to the XBOX Live dashboard, gamers can adjust their gamer picture and personal picture. The personal picture appears only to your friends. I was able to capture a still shot with the webcam and use it as my personal picture. Microsoft added a lot of cool effects to add to your still picture – sepia, black/white, blurs, hue adjustments, and so on. This made for some interesting shots.

By the way, on the back of the packaging is a screenshot of Texas Hold ‘Em. The box suggests that Texas Hold ‘Em had video capabilities. However, much to my disappointment the game doesn’t have video capabilities. Here’s hoping that they’ll add a patch to support the camera…as well as fix a few bugs in this broken game.

I haven't been in any game that supports this device yet. Only UNO, a few XBL Arcade card games like Hearts and Spades and the new Poker game (not the Texas Hold 'Em XBOX Live Arcade game) support this camera at this time. It will be neat to see how developers use this device in their games. I wonder how Halo 3 could take advantage of this camera?

In all, this device is a simple webcam. There are definitely more advanced cameras available for the PC. This camera didn't exceed my expectations, though. This is only a console camera. However, I can easily imaging owning a more advanced version of this camera. A wireless XBOX 360 camera surely will come out in time. I mean the XBOX 360 is about wireless gaming with its wireless controllers and network adapters. I'm guessing 3rd party research labs are already getting on the action. Here's hoping for a wireless transmitting, three megapixel+ camera with pan, tilt, rotate capabilities that supports auto-focus. If you don't have UNO, need an extra headset, or want to buy an extra month of XBOX Live, this camera might not be a bad purchase for you.