Part of the free Kinect Fun Labs package, Kinect Me scans your face and full body and transforms the images into an avatar. Well, at least that's what Microsoft claims it does.
When I tested it, however, the avatar it created didn't resemble "me" in any shape or form. My face has nothing to do with the avatar's - even when I removed glasses, it produced a badly deformed version at best, and instead of my stubble beard, I got pink (!) smears around my mouth. Awesome. The only thing it got right was my hair.
The body is another issue. During the test, I was wearing a plain black t-shirt and beige shorts. Neither was captured properly - the shorts ended up as long trousers looking more like army surplus than anything else, and the shirt became grey with artifacts of the rather bad Kinect camera on top.
Of course, I just had to try the scanning process naked - well, the upper body at least, because you never know what Microsoft is doing with these pictures, right? What can I say - it works, looks so-so, and it tells me I need to work out. Badly.
But in the end, it hardly matters, because it's not like you could export your created avatar and use it on Xbox Live - instead, you are treated to pose for a photo shoot. These pics can also be shared via the KinectShare.com website, although this never worked for me - the upload seemed to function, but the pictures never showed up on the site.
There are 8 achievements to be gained, which is well possible to do within 30 minutes. The only slightly grindy stuff is to share 10 photo shoots and do 25 shoots total, but even that is nothing to worry about.
For the low price of free, it's a nice idea and a small gamerscore boost is always welcome, but sadly, it doesn't really do everything as well as advertised and since you can't use the created avatars, it's a pretty useless toy.
3.0