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Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect (fastcodesign.com)
Manufacturing of the Kinect has shut down, reports FastMagazine: Originally created for the Xbox 360, Microsoft's watershed depth camera and voice recognition microphone sold about 35 million units since its debut in 2010, but Microsoft will no longer produce it when retailers sell off their existing stock. The company will continue to support Kinect for customers on Xbox, but ongoing developer tools remain unclear. Microsoft shared the news with Co.Design in exclusive interviews with Alex Kipman, creator of the Kinect, and Matthew Lapsen, GM of Xbox Devices Marketing. The Kinect had already been slowly de-emphasized by Microsoft, as the Xbox team anchored back around traditional gaming to counter the PS4, rather than take its more experimental approach to entertainment. Yet while the Kinect as a standalone product is off the market, its core sensor lives on. Kinect v4 -- and soon to be, v5 -- power Microsoft's augmented reality Hololens, which Kipman also created. Meanwhile, Kinect's team of specialists have gone on to build essential Microsoft technologies, including the Cortana voice assistant, the Windows Hello biometric facial ID system, and a context-aware user interface for the future that Microsoft dubs Gaze, Gesture and Voice (GGV).
if my wrists weren't turned into a knotted, gnarled mess from years of forced motion controls in games.
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I have the XBox One. It came with the Kinect. I can sit in front of the TV, and I get auto logged in. Are they removing the Kinect for the X? Or after the X?
I do not respond to trolls (AKA Anonymous Cowards)
The people saying it was no good are just the casual dumbasses that tried to use it to game or whatever.
Developers on the other hand had a field day with them. Very interesting and useful tech that was used for all sorts of cool projects that still continue to this day.
I picked up a launch Xbox One where the Kinect came bundled with the system and while the Kinect hardware was really good Microsoft blew it on the software/gaming side of things. Early games for the system only used it for in game voice commands, which I never used. The voice commands are nice for turning the system on and off, launching a game or app, but that's about it.
The wasted potential part was where were the big first party games/demos that used it? Augmented reality games, something maybe like Sony's Playroom. I was really shocked Microsoft had nothing clever like this to demo the Kinect hardware. They seemed apathetic towards it a launch and that continued on during its lifespan. In the latest Xbox software update they added support for 3rd party webcams, so the demise of the Kinect isn't all that surprising.
Well damn. The 3 people who willingly owned one must be devastated.
Kinect was a good product with some great applications both on the 360 and the Xbone. The reason that it fell flat was because they tried to charge $100 more for the Xbone with the kinect and wanted it to spy on you 24/7. If they had bundled it at the same price point as PS4, kept the same UI and store interface as the 360, made all 360 kinect titles backwards compatible to Xbone and not tried to dick over the customers with always online/spying, the Xbone launch would have been a lot smoother and more competitive. The death of the Kinect lies at the feet of marketing and a greedy company who tried MS monopoly BS tactics where there was real competition (PS4) and the market bitch slapped them.
If you disagree, please post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like
We must not allow this tech to go, otherwise ghosts will jump on us and not be detected.
Hey, its close to Halloween.
I bought a connect with our XBox 360 and I like it. It's nice for the kids to be able to move around on rainy days. It did a good job at what it promised to do and I was surprised how accurate it was to control. Is anything replacing it? This is the only kind of device I could envision replacing a mouse some day. Controllers with gyroscopes just don't cut it.
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In addition to the forced Kinect, the launch of X-Bone was crippled by the announced constant DRM, the attempt to kill off 2nd hand game sales and zero backwards compatibility. It was also intended as a platform to force-feed ads, first and foremost:
https://www.vg247.com/2013/07/...
“On Xbox, the ad is part of the actual experience, it’s not something that is outside. The only difference is that the advertisement we have is quite small and not disruptive so people are not aware of clicking on the banners because they know this is a part of the whole experience on the dash.
“So the users know that this is something that when they click on it, they won’t be hit by something crazy or something dangerous like on the web. Everything that lands there, we create.”
One source called the development of adverts for Xbox One “exciting”, because, “the 360 console wasn’t built with advertising in mind, it was more of an afterthought, so we’ve had to adapt to the technology and how we work to fit them in to the console, whereas this new one is going to have advertising in mind.
“So a lot of the limitations that we have now, hopefully the release of the boundaries will widened so the opportunities will be a lot greater.”
http://hothardware.com/news/mi...
The Xbox is developing native advertising, where ad content is displayed alongside relevant material, either embedded in search results, promoted on a network like Facebook, or a "Liked X? You'll Love Y!" style of marketing. Not to worry, though -- the company plans to use Kinect to make these advertisements even more engaging than their current counterparts. In the future, Kinect may offer you a "Choose Your Own Adventure" style narrative in which you speak commands or give orders to an ad as its playing to change the final outcome.
The other way the company wants to use Kinect is to monitor what's going on in the living room to serve you group-appropriate content, rather than resorting to the plain old method of bombarding you with non-interactive advertising for things you don't care about. Microsoft claims that the demographic data the ad team can access is very limited, but it's hard not to see shadows of the same patent for movie licensing that the company applied for last year.
I still haven't mastered playing "The Grumpy Snail" on it.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Come on people, this is Slashdot ... someone has to relate it to the Minority Report user interface.
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I actually loved the Kinect, it's what got me onto the XBox in the first place. I wanted a way of having fun/playing games, while also being active. I might be in the minority but I thoroughly enjoyed the Kinect.
MS canceling a stupid product of theirs. Who would have thunk.
I recently bought a second-hand Kinect 1 to use it in my robotics pet projects and it looked very promising (see OpenKinect and OpenCV). Why can't MS kill Windows 10 instead?
Open Source Network Inventory for the masses! Kuwaiba
It took me a few second to remember what it was about.
Irrelevant news and morons using moderation to mod down what they disagree on. 2018 resolution: so long.
When they kept pushing Kinect during the XBOne launch, I assumed they would eventually pair it with a VR headset. A VR system that knows where your legs, arms (and perhaps even fingers) are could have been really cool. Stomping things with your Godzilla legs or whatever could have been pretty neat.
Barring VR, they needed more creative experiences instead of using the Kinect as a terrible controller. Kinect Party was good. A simple "use your body to animate characters on screen" game would have been great too (I think there was one game where you could do this a bit in, like, a title screen, and that was the best part of that game). Just a 3d painting game (as we got later in Google Tilt Brush) would have been big.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
The developers I mean (including MS) -- they relied on skeleton tracking, which misses all too often, as the primary control, instead of relying on depth points first and using skeleton tracking data only as a backup. The outline of the player almost never misses, so if you see your outline inside the game you can reliably trigger all sorts of virtual triggers around you. I made a couple of PC games that did that and you could play them for hours (classic arcades, for a very niche market, recently they were accepted for ID@Xbox, I might go ahead and publish them anyway). To my knowledge only two non-dance games used that scheme, one is Fruit Ninja and the other was a Kung Fu game which was well done but it was sort of a 2D scroller and the player faced away from the screen which looked odd.
The other thing that slowed down the adoption on the PC a lot IMO was that you needed an adapter. MS probably though Kinect was going to be so awesome they wanted to control the entrance to the gates. In retrospect that was a bad move.
We got a Kinect so that our kids could move around a bit without having to exit the home in the dark winter evenings. Other than the bundled "Kinect Sports Rivals" and "Dance Central Spotlight", we also found Kung-Fu for Kinect and Fru enjoyable. In particular, Fru is a rather cool game where your body silhouette becomes part of the gamescape and you have to manipulate it to ascend levels.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
The kinect has always been a smoking deal, and has enabled some really cool robotics research that otherwise wouldn't have been possible without a $20k outlay for laser rangefinders of comparable speed and resolution. Thankfully, things have gotten much cheaper in that area since the kinect first came out, but it's still a sad day for the amateur/low-cost robotics crowd.
Or if you want a cheaper, more realistic option you could go out and ask women if they want to have sex. You'd be surprised at how many women are down for it.