The Microsoft Kinect peripheral has been seen as an innovative technology for human-computer interaction and not just for video games as it had been released. Along came CES and Steve Ballmer himself introduced Avatar Kinect to surprised and adoring audience. The technology behind Avatar uses the Kinect’s capability of recognizing facial expressions and translating emotions into computer code.

With this ability, Avatar Kinect will probably revolutionize (or simply gimmick) Xbox LIVE chat.

According to an article recently published at Microsoft’s News Center we might be seeing this arrive later this spring (but isn’t it summer already?) They also go into the timeline of the growth of the Avatar Kinect software and how they intend to implement it when it finally arrives,

“The work that we did was taking something that was essentially a demo and turning it into a product,” said Eric Lang, a general manager for Microsoft Startup Business Group. “It’s a huge amount of work.” That work included developing algorithms for facial expressions and making sure the computer vision could work with Kinect, Lang said.

What started in Microsoft Research as a study of the “geometry of a gaze” and the science of the smile was incubated by the Startup Business Group, he said. Working closely with Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business, his group tweaked the technology, refined it, and built a home for it on Kinect, Lang said.

“It was personally very gratifying to see the teams come together and find creative solutions,” said Pete Thompson, general manager of Xbox LIVE. “The end result is a highly-curated consumer service that is very compelling, but also has tremendous headroom for future innovation from Microsoft and its partners.”

The mention of customer service is particularly interesting in relation to the Avatar Kinect system. Most of the time when someone contact’s customer service it’s going to be on the telephone or via e-mail (or in some circumstances, a chat program.) What do all of these things lack? All of them fail to translate body language from the client to the customer service agent. Although voice certainly does better for this, there’s still an almost clinical separation.

Avatar Kinect could put a “human face” on these interactions very easily.

Video chat is extremely bandwidth intensive—but sending expression and gesture data in a sideband alongside voice would take up much less band. Not mention, using Avatar Kinect means that the client doesn’t need to worry about getting pretty and can still receive the benefit of having semi-video dealings. A great deal of human communication happens through body language and expression, much of our brains are dedicated to addressing the emotional state of other people and a giant chunk of customer service is about making other people happy about a product.

Examining the implications this might have for customer service is only the beginning. What about mobile-to-mobile video communication? With data prices at such a premium and roaming WiFi bandwidth not always the best thing, why not leverage the expression recognition technology that has been developed and tested by the Kinect in smartphones? The telepresence benefit for actually having a face can make our current communications technology that much more “human.” Can we say an excellent use of Skype’s network that Microsoft just bought for $8.5 billion?

While it’s obvious that the social networking aspect of Avatar Kinect will generate a boom of YouTUBE videos and possibly some amazing vlogs and video podcasts, it’s the social impact of expression recognition technology that we should be pushing for. As people argue that the Internet and phones and other communications push us further apart, we should be using that magic to bring us closer together as it allows us to live more independent lives.

If there appears a SiliconANGLE podcast directed and filmed in Avatar Kinect, would you watch?