Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect (fastcodesign.com)

Posted by msmash on Wednesday October 25, 2017 @04:40AM from the end-of-road dept.

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).

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Wasted potential by dstyle5 · 2017-10-25 04:58 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.