The Kinect was a real boon for robotics research. A depth camera that worked pretty well, with skeleton extraction and directional audio? And the price is what!? My lab still uses a first gen Kinect regularly.
Thanks to Jamie Shotton and the team for a sensor that made a difference to an incidental community.
It's still wild to me how consumer hardware outpaced cheap lab tech so decisively around 2010-2012.
At the time I was in a research lab that needed wireless networking + high-def video + light source + on-device processing + battery power + small form factor. It turns out that even compared to Raspberry Pi, the cheapest possible solution to that problem was "buy old Androids on Ebay and add external batteries". A handful of years before that we would have been cobbling together a $500 device, or more realistically scrapping the whole project.
The whole model of feature-dense sensors suddenly crossed from something for major production runs and custom orders into single-unit consumer products, and I'm not sure people really noticed how big an impact it had on research.
This is actually a reason I am kind of surprised to see Microsoft just shut this down outright. Even as a much more limited run product, Kinect has so many possibilities in robotics and research, and it intersects with the VR/AR developments today.
I was talking to someone 3 days ago about how his company has been hoarding Kinects because they knew this day was coming.
I think robotics research is probably a reason why they're discontinuing it. Why support something that only exists outside the walled garden? Maybe not the only reason, but a reason. The device probably isn't generating profits, and the value gain on top of that is missing because the gaming community has abandoned it.
There is the Asus Xtion which is a knock off Primesense Carmine. Google Tango is basically the same technology, as is Apple's Face ID*. Intel's realsense systems are also similar, but I don't know anyone who actually uses them.
Unfortunately Microsoft missed the chance to buy Primsesense before Apple snapped them up. Still, while the tech is good, the ToF sensor in the Kinect v2 is superior for the (gaming) market and Microsoft own the IP via their Canesta acquisition (they licensed the Kinect patent).
What's more interesting is the boatload of cheap ToF systems that you can now buy. The only problem is they're much more power hungry. The new Kinect is crappy for mobile robotics because its heavy (90% of the sensor head is heatsink) and needs a wall power supply. It's fine for static systems, or beefier mechanics though.
(Face ID is literally a mini-Kinect, since it comes out of Primsense IP.)
Occipital still produces the Structure Sensor [1], which uses similar technology to the 1st generation Kinect. They've also recently introduced the Structure Core [2], a new generation, miniaturized depth sensor designed to be embedded into anything that needs that kind of sensing.
I'm pretty sure cheap and high quality lidar is coming very very quickly - so many companies working on it. There will be no market for an awkward kinect. Kinect is not great compared to modern lidar systems anyhow, it was just more accessible.
Maybe that was MS' problem. People that buy a 1st gen (2010) and still using it. Not upgrading it. Not replacing it. MS can't possibly profit off of it when only 1 kinect per lab is bought.
That's definitely a huge part of it. But MS would still be happy to lose money on kinect if game makers were making nice games for it.
The only game in my house that could ever utilize it was the original Dancing games from the demos. The last time I saw my daughter playing it, she was holding her phone, and using it for the sensor instead of the kinect through their integrated app.
I asked why she would do that? Just plug in the kinect and use it, don't risk dropping your phone while dancing, but that's not how she wanted to play.
This makes me sad, because my experience with my own Kinect (360) was very much a "this could be awesome if it wasn't burdened with stupid crap".
I bought it for my kids. Turns out, the Kinect is awful for kids. They were far too little for the Kinect to properly see them, and the motions to actually use it were super fussy. Then if I walked in to try to help them, the Kinect would freak out that there was a new person in view. The dog walking by would mess it up as well.
Basically, you would need a large dedicated room for the stupid thing, and you would need to be at least 8 or so to have a chance at using it properly. Then the games were meh.
If you had a large enough dedicated room (I used most of a basement once, with a lot of setup work to give the Kinect the view of just about the whole room) and the right games (some games were less fiddly if multiple people/gestures were recognized that others [1]; though a lot of the management of it is still taking turns and having patience) it was sort of magic to watch particularly young kids play with the Kinect.
Especially then it seemed like a glimpse into a future of where the technology could go, and though that magic was sometimes finicky, it was still magic when it worked.
[1] Kinectimals (essentially a "cat petting" simulator) I recall particularly launching for my youngest cousins to enjoy. There were others, but that's the first to mind; this was a couple years back at a holiday party where most of this happened.
Speaking of magic, universal uses Kinect for Harry Potter in Knockturn Alley. Was surprised to see a simple Kinect running it (hard to see but it’s in a box to the left of the skeleton magic wand experience).
Kinectimals was actually well beyond the standard skeletonization system - I think they rewrote a chunk of the stack to allow for younger kids to use it and have it perform well.
> I bought it for my kids. Turns out, the Kinect is awful for kids.
What's sad is that it could have been great, if MS just put a little more dedication and effort towards it. The Kinect Sesame Street games had so much potential. Hopefully another company can do better. Could be wrong but I think Apple bought the company behind the original Kinect's technology
My 2-3 year old kids love the Kinect on the xbone. Well, the love Fruit Ninja on there and have zero problems with it despite their stature. They've played the game weekly for a couple years now.
I just point the Kinect down a little for them (and play on my knees if I join them) and sometimes move one sofa back a couple feet if more than one person is playing at a time.
The improvements in the xbone over 360 in the Kinect department were huge.
I kept waiting for another game in the vein of Fruit Ninja, but none came.
Also use the Kinect for voice controls on movies. It was the equivalent of the Echo but well ahead of time.
One thing that hasn't been mentioned: Kinect was Microsoft's reaction to Wii's success.
I worked at Microsoft when the first Kinect came out. I spoke with a few members of that team (non-engineers). My question was very clear -- are you expecting this to takeover for controller based gaming? I don't recall all the responses, but I think the overall sentiment was along the lines of "No, but it might", whereas my thoughts were along the lines of it absolutely will not, this is such a gimmick. I'm not a gamer at all, but I used to be in college. When I want to game, I plop down on my couch and mash on the controller. If I wanted to jump around and flail my arms, I'd go to the gym or play some pickup basketball.
I think there was (maybe is) a disconnect between Microsoft and hardcore gamers. Kinect and Xbox One's initial non-gaming features were an attempt to take Xbox "mainstream". Stop it. Appeal to the core demographic. To their credit, it seems like they've been doing that now.
> I think the overall sentiment was along the lines of "No, but it might",
This is business though. Lots of stupid side products and features are launched to compete with ideas that might take over. If it doesn't, fine but if it does become popular you aren't 5 years behind and dead in the water.
This is my concern with VR not taking off with the mainstream. Many gamers (myself included) want to plop down on the couch and not move around much. Many of the VR experiences coming out require movement, not to mention the initial effort to put on the headset.
I'm a huge proponent of VR (backer #238 of the Rift on Kickstarter), but I worry VR headsets will end up in the dustbin with the Kinect for this very reason...
vr has larger problems. mainly, the nausea thing: your character can't accelerate at all without giving you really unpleasant nausea. The strength of that nausea isn't being exaggerated. That takes out all games that you would think are good ideas for vr, like sports games, fighter jet games, .. first person shooters where your character walks around.. basically first person anything where your character isn't always moving at constant speed or teleporting is ruled out.
It's a shame.. but it's really how it is
There are seated vr experiences too, but as a Vive owner, I don't think they're going to get cheap enough quickly enough to take off. Maybe we'll get attempt #3 taking off next decade..
Oddly enough, both Wii and Kinect were very successful outside their official gaming applications, because people were able to hack their protocols and use them in ways the manufacturers never intended.
I remember buying a Wii just for the gesture control capabilities. I wrote a whole VJ performance app based on Wii gestures, so you could crossfade video and scrub through animations (the video equivalent of a DJ scratching records), just by waving your hands around. I toured with that thing for years... it was so essential to my performance that I stashed a few candles in my bag, so I could use them for IR tracking in case the sensor bar stopped working.
I then bought a Kinect and used it in a couple performances, projecting 3d mapped effects on to the band onstage. Even with VR/AR tech now: it starts with games but then gets co-opted into art and music. Open, hackable hardware is so important for society.
I bought an Xbox because of the kinect (and two of my friends did the same). I tend to play on my computer otherwise but the kinect was fun and something different. Just wished there had been more games using the kinect better.
Having games that are fun and allow me to play without plopping down in my sofa is definitely a plus. I get enough sitting done when working.
I bought the original Kinect, and I bought an Xbox One after the Kinect was no longer mandatory but I later bought a separate Kinect for it. It has moments of transcendence and a lot of failures between those moments. There's a handful of games where the Kinect sensor really makes sense, and a lot of games where it was shoehorned in and wasn't fun. The biggest problem is that it requires a lot of space. It's a pain to set up, and often a working setup doesn't work for the rest of your life, so you have to rearrange furniture every time you want to use it. It's an interesting piece of tech, but it never really got to be easy enough to use to be what Microsoft wanted it to be.
Another problem is the failure rate and time to failure. Even when we didn't use it often, my unit failed in about 6-8 months. My replacement unit failed in less than 6 months. MS refused to send me a replacement for the 2nd unit. It was a missed opportunity because Kinect was there much earlier than Amazon Echo. MS just wasn't as committed to improving it.
Mine turns itself off and back on every 10-30 minutes of use. Very annoying, but too expensive and too little use to justify replacing out of warranty.
Mine (Xbox One) failed after a year as well. I didn't use the motion sensor as much as the always on Mic. I loved walking into the room and saying "Xbox On" and my Xbox would turn on. "Xbox Pause" and "Xbox resume" when watching a movie and later when Cortana was integrated it became even more useful. But once it failed, I never thought it was important enough for me to replace it.
The lots of space problem is an issue with VR headsets too. Even I have trouble setting up mine because of the space issue and the fact that its just plain easier for me to do something else.
This is a shame. I mean, yeah, it was a pretty awkward gaming accessory, but outside the context of gaming people were doing some pretty fun things with it. A powerful sensor at a ridiculously cheap cost that you could use to create amazing things, provided of course your imagination wasn't weighed down by the latest dumb tech trend. That last statement is just as true now as it was when the Kinect originally came out.
Gives me some strange feels about the current state of the tech economy. The Kinect is being retired at the same time Amazon and Google are caught up in a dumb contest to see who can produce the best hockey-puck-sized speaker that can add items to your shopping list. As overwhelmingly large as tech giants like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Apple are, they seem mostly resigned to following trends, as opposed to creating new ones.
Don't forget, smartwatches originated from a highly successful Kickstarter campaign. Same can be said for VR. Bitcoin, and blockchain by extension, originated from a white paper published by someone who's still to this day a complete mystery.
Tech giants are very much capable of generating cash, but are damned by their inability to create gold.
"A powerful sensor at a ridiculously cheap cost that you could use to create amazing things, provided of course your imagination wasn't weighed down by the latest dumb tech trend"
This. And thanks to software/hardware patents, the technology will die with the product, or remain dormant until the owner will either decide to make something else with it or (not holding my breath) release it under a FOSS license.
In the meantime, like always, landfills in the 3rd world will be inundated by more hardware which could be still perfectly useable if its life didn't depend on the wishes of a single company.
> landfills in the 3rd world will be inundated by more hardware which could be still perfectly useable if its life didn't depend on the wishes of a single company.
Well that's a silly comment, because by choosing not to make more then there would actually be fewer kinects in landfills than if they had decided to continue manufacturing. The decision to "build more" has absolutely nothing to do with folks deciding to throw away the ones they've already bought.
There already is something else “like” it: the front-facing camera in the iPhone X.
On one hand, you could see this as fooling around with Kinect tech now requiring a $1000 investment in an iPhone. (Or buying a Kinect used; there are still plenty on the market.)
On the other hand, you could believe in the inevitability of Shenzhen to take the probably $3 part Apple has designed, stick it into a little housing with a micro controller, and commoditize “Kinect Minis” within the year. :)
Wasn't the Kinect technology acquired by Apple? My impression is the top sensor bar in the iPhone X is essentially a miniaturized Kinect, so we should see more Kinect-like applications now that it fits in your pocket.
I don't think the maker community hanging on to their Kinects is going to put a dent in the e-waste impact. People are tossing these things in droves because they are a useless waste of space.
The one _very_ successful aspect of the Kinect was it's speech recognition capabilities. People saying: "Xbox Play Netflix" - that very much preceded the current boom in what you accurately describe as the hockey puck speakers.
Another much under-appreciated aspect of Kinect was what an absolutely phenomenal video conferencing system it was - using Skype on Xbox was on par with expensive custom systems. Great speakerphone (that audio recognition) and it would resize the focus on the fly to include all the faces in the room (panning around).
The tech was extremely impressive, but it always seemed like a classic case of a solution looking for a problem, which to me it's apparent biggest successes as a tool in universities/research groups bore out. Great for Human Computer Interaction type research, everything else not so much it seemed.
At any rate, the idea lives on in Apple's iPhone X in a much more practical application.
> Don't forget, smartwatches originated from a highly successful Kickstarter campaign.
This is a big stretch, in my opinion. I think we'd have worked out that a screen on our wrist with useful info is nice regardless of what happened on Kickstarter, this wasn't exactly an incredible discovery.
There had been countless fitness tracking watches that aren't really all that far removed from the public want from smart watches from Garmin et al long before Pebble tried their thing too. The barrier was arguably getting efficient SoCs that could last a day doing something useful far more than it was anything to do with crowd funding.
> Tech giants are very much capable of generating cash, but are damned by their inability to create gold.
>Amazon and Google are caught up in a dumb contest to see who can produce the best hockey-puck-sized speaker that can add items to your shopping list
But you know why it is so, don't you? The allure for an information company of having an always-on, always internet connected, high-sensitivity microphone, running proprietary software doing god knows what, the allure of having such a device in as many homes as possible is only too obvious.
The only thing more shameful than them pushing this garbage is the consumers' willingness to eat it all up.
Which is why you buy it, and when not at home, play really loud, awkward and uncomfortable recordings of someone having bad, sweaty, cringe-inducing sex. For hours on end.
If you're into software, you could make it exciting. Perhaps write a scraper to strip the audio off porn clips, mix it up with old Khruschev speeches?
Could be a tactic to fight systems like these - overwhelm them with garbage data.
Isn't this the backbone of the entire console gaming industry though? Has there ever been a popular console that directly turned a profit through hardware sales? I was under the impression that basically the entire revenue stream comes from game licensing fees from publishers, with hardware as loss leaders across the board.
> Don't forget, smartwatches originated from a highly successful Kickstarter campaign.
Also don't forget that Sony Ericsson released the MBW-100 smartwatch[1] several years before Kickstarter existed ... so I'm not sure how they could have originated on Kickstarter.
i mean, the amazon echo was a pretty interesting new thing that they created a market for. tthen once they realized people were buying it every big tech company jumped on it to not get behind.
the problem is if google doesn't go into the "speaker with a voice assistant" space, they allow amazon to possibly gain dominance in said space. this is why everyone wants to get in on drone delivery, self-driving cars, vr, etc..
and while "creative", the kinect wasn't a thing microsoft invented either. in fact, primesense, the company that created the original kinect got bought out by apple, and basically that tech is in the iphone x now.
I used to work at a telemedicine company that uses the Kinect as the primary input for their core product, to enable at-home physical therapy.
Before I left we were doing the work to transition to v2 and were well aware that it was not an earner for MS, but I think the prevailing notion was this was too important to the research community and MS was in it for the long game hoping for it to take off in other industries.
In any case, I reached out to a friend there who tells me they were aware of this eventuality for some time and have another option (smaller, more accurate) that they are in the process of migrating to.
Having invented something is only useful if you're actually able to get that something into peoples hands. As much as I hate how people drool over overpriced Apple hardware, they've done a great job putting greenfield tech into the hands of consumers. Microsoft conversely actually does "invent" a lot of cool things, but for the last 20 years they've been pretty bad at turning those cool things into successful things
"hockey puck that can add things to your shopping list" sounds a whole lot better than "always-on video phone" which they are also competing to put on your shelf.
(and the hockey puck sounds pretty... pretty dumb)
> Amazon and Google are caught up in a dumb contest to see who can produce the best hockey-puck-sized speaker that can add items to your shopping list.
Youre either misrepresenting or woefully misunderstanding this. The echo et al are no more about selling a $50 shopping list speaker than when Amazon/Barnes and Noble/Sony were going at over $50 e-ink readers.
It's not really a shame. The Kinect is out of date and never caught on, and there are much better newer sensors that play the same role for researchers and experimenters. If you'd buy a Kinect for hacking, you'd buy Intel's Euclid or another RealSense camera, e.g.
If anything, it's surprising Microsoft kept building and subsidizing these things for as long as they did.
> Amazon and Google are caught up in a dumb contest to see who can produce the best hockey-puck-sized speaker [...]. As overwhelmingly large as tech giants like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Apple are, they seem mostly resigned to following trends, as opposed to creating new ones.
I don't think you're giving these companies adequate credit for their innovation. :-)
It's worth remembering that the Echo, a voice-powered home assistant that can be spoken to anywhere in a room ("far-field" voice recognition), was novel when Amazon introduced it. Similarly, the digital e-ink reader was novel when Amazon launched the Kindle. Two other concepts that seem novel to me are the Amazon Go stores (checkout-less shopping) and Amazon Prime Air (automated drone delivery), both works-in-progress. Consider Amazon Web Services (est. 2006) and the cloud services boom.
Amazon created the first devices/services that resulted in the trends for home assistants and ebook readers (etc.), so I don't think it's fair to name them as "mostly resigned to following trends".
Similarly, although Google seems to have followed Amazon's lead with respect to home assistants, it's certainly innovating in the capabilities of their service, and in other areas. Google's voice assistant has access to incredible amounts of information, presumably powered by Google's search and understanding of questions and context. While both Alexa and Google can answer "When was Abraham Lincoln born?", only Google can more difficult questions like "Who was the second CEO of Microsoft?" (per my test today). However, none of the offerings can yet answer "When was the second CEO of Microsoft born?" Boiling the situation down to shopping lists ignores the capability variation in products.
Of course every company will follow trends to some extent, since to do otherwise is to give up a potential market segment. Companies don't exist per se to create trends; they exist to capitalize on business opportunities. A lot of the big tech companies have expertise they can leverage to enter new tech segments, or have related services that they can integrate. E.g., if Apple has Siri and the Apple TV, then a home assistant may still be a sensible play, even if Amazon did it first.
Trying to create a new trend is risky and requires large investment. For every hit like the Echo, you might strike out like the Fire Phone; for every hit like the Pixel phone you might strike out like Google Glass or have moderate success like Kinect. It makes sense for companies to create offerings when there's a proven model to follow in addition to investing in new innovative ideas.
If following is the only thing a company does, then you might judge them as not being innovative; but before you do that, you should look at the innovative things they're trying too, such as the Glass, the Kindle, the Kinect. Apple has been incredibly innovative in their phone design and security features: the first to offer a touch-based phone with no keyboard (as far as I know); the first to offer fingerprint-based unlock instead of PIN code unlock (so convenient!), and now face-recognition based unlock; Siri may have been the first useful voice assistant. Apple's security and privacy has been industry-leading, e.g. Secure Enclave. Apple CarPlay is a great experience and surpasses every other car integration system I've used.
I believe that the reason all of the named companies have continued to be successful and remain market leaders is because they are innovating in products and services.
Most unfortunate. I was hoping to see the technology applied to VR. One of my complaints/observations about VR is that you are a disembodied viewpoint in the VR environment. Something like a Kinect mocap system would add bodily presence in the VR environment.
>> Something like a Kinect mocap system would add bodily presence in the VR environment.
I personally spearheaded a couple of projects to make it work with the Vive in this way.
Unfortunately, the Kinect's tendency to screw up leg motion, SDK's and API's that read like an old grimoire of Black Magick and worked about just as well, as well as it's proprietary skeleton detection drivers, which prevented me from getting in and fixing a lot of these issues, which caused the company I worked for to drop it completely.
a focus on 'developers developers developers' could've really saved this thing.
There are open-source projects to allow a Vive to leverage Kinect motion tracking. And HTC is developing a full body motion tracker.
These are solutions I found when looking into leg sensors for a Taekwondo VR training game. I feel we're approaching a technology intersection between self-driving cars and VR, in the need to map physical spaces and the objects therein. I keep waiting for someone to bring in eTemplate laser scanning tech to bridge the gap, but nobody has. I fear most people see these as entirely separate domains with little overlap.
I think the technology (basically structured light / ToF) is and will be implemented in many tech, like the Hololens, but also in the iPhone X (Apple bought Primesense which created the first Kinect).
I think we will still see that technology in many products to come.
It is applied to VR. Kinect technology is a part of HoloLens and is used for inside-out tracking in recent crop of Windows VR headsets from Acer, Dell, HP and the likes.
Kinect was a phenomenal piece of technology for a lot of my highly experimental AR stuff.
However, a lack of MacOS support, terrible drivers for Windows that worked about half the time with my Unity rig, non-native Unity support, et al, really messed up a lot of the longer-term plans I had for it, and caused it to not be reliable enough to ever use in a production environment.
The developers make or break a piece of hardware, and while I get that it was mainly an XBOX device, when it failed to make a serious splash there, they could've saved the hardware by working with its high-demand for a ton of different high-tech solutions and provided consistently better SDK's and API's.
Good riddance, because hopefully we'll get something better. Shame, because Microsoft really had a product that spoke to higher-end developers and filled a phenomenal void for a low-cost alternative to brutally high-cost motion capture and natural interaction systems.
Structure Sensor supports OpenNI 2 on Linux, Mac, Windows, and our own Structure SDK on iOS. It oughta do anything you could want from a Kinect and a bit more.
It's a magnificent device for tinkerers. My workplace picked up a few Kinects when we needed a quick & cheap motion capture solution to animate a few characters in our Unity game. We were quite impressed by how well it did; it could even do facial capture! We still had to hand-tune some of the keyframes, but it saved us countless hours of animating.
After getting all of our motion capture done, we wanted to see what else we could do with it. I stumbled across a [1]repo from a few years ago that live-streams the depth data as a point cloud system in the browser. So we cleaned up the code, set up a kinect to point at our office entrance, and now have it live-streaming in the header of our [2]website! It's a bit too heavy on mobile, so we're currently working on a fallback.
Readit News
Thanks to Jamie Shotton and the team for a sensor that made a difference to an incidental community.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/video/body-part-rec...
At the time I was in a research lab that needed wireless networking + high-def video + light source + on-device processing + battery power + small form factor. It turns out that even compared to Raspberry Pi, the cheapest possible solution to that problem was "buy old Androids on Ebay and add external batteries". A handful of years before that we would have been cobbling together a $500 device, or more realistically scrapping the whole project.
The whole model of feature-dense sensors suddenly crossed from something for major production runs and custom orders into single-unit consumer products, and I'm not sure people really noticed how big an impact it had on research.
I think robotics research is probably a reason why they're discontinuing it. Why support something that only exists outside the walled garden? Maybe not the only reason, but a reason. The device probably isn't generating profits, and the value gain on top of that is missing because the gaming community has abandoned it.
Unfortunately Microsoft missed the chance to buy Primsesense before Apple snapped them up. Still, while the tech is good, the ToF sensor in the Kinect v2 is superior for the (gaming) market and Microsoft own the IP via their Canesta acquisition (they licensed the Kinect patent).
What's more interesting is the boatload of cheap ToF systems that you can now buy. The only problem is they're much more power hungry. The new Kinect is crappy for mobile robotics because its heavy (90% of the sensor head is heatsink) and needs a wall power supply. It's fine for static systems, or beefier mechanics though.
(Face ID is literally a mini-Kinect, since it comes out of Primsense IP.)
[1] https://structure.io
[2] https://structure.io/core
https://www.intel.ca/content/www/ca/en/architecture-and-tech...
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The only game in my house that could ever utilize it was the original Dancing games from the demos. The last time I saw my daughter playing it, she was holding her phone, and using it for the sensor instead of the kinect through their integrated app.
I asked why she would do that? Just plug in the kinect and use it, don't risk dropping your phone while dancing, but that's not how she wanted to play.
I bought it for my kids. Turns out, the Kinect is awful for kids. They were far too little for the Kinect to properly see them, and the motions to actually use it were super fussy. Then if I walked in to try to help them, the Kinect would freak out that there was a new person in view. The dog walking by would mess it up as well.
Basically, you would need a large dedicated room for the stupid thing, and you would need to be at least 8 or so to have a chance at using it properly. Then the games were meh.
But it could have been so much better.
Especially then it seemed like a glimpse into a future of where the technology could go, and though that magic was sometimes finicky, it was still magic when it worked.
[1] Kinectimals (essentially a "cat petting" simulator) I recall particularly launching for my youngest cousins to enjoy. There were others, but that's the first to mind; this was a couple years back at a holiday party where most of this happened.
What's sad is that it could have been great, if MS just put a little more dedication and effort towards it. The Kinect Sesame Street games had so much potential. Hopefully another company can do better. Could be wrong but I think Apple bought the company behind the original Kinect's technology
I just point the Kinect down a little for them (and play on my knees if I join them) and sometimes move one sofa back a couple feet if more than one person is playing at a time.
The improvements in the xbone over 360 in the Kinect department were huge.
I kept waiting for another game in the vein of Fruit Ninja, but none came.
Also use the Kinect for voice controls on movies. It was the equivalent of the Echo but well ahead of time.
Microsoft could have taken the outcry about the bundling 2 ways:
1) Make the Kinect awesome with awesome software, and make those people wish they had gotten it bundled.
2) Fall on their sword and assume that when people don't want to be _forced_ into something is also means that they don't want to choose it ever.
They obviously chose option 2, but I think option 1 would have served them better.
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I worked at Microsoft when the first Kinect came out. I spoke with a few members of that team (non-engineers). My question was very clear -- are you expecting this to takeover for controller based gaming? I don't recall all the responses, but I think the overall sentiment was along the lines of "No, but it might", whereas my thoughts were along the lines of it absolutely will not, this is such a gimmick. I'm not a gamer at all, but I used to be in college. When I want to game, I plop down on my couch and mash on the controller. If I wanted to jump around and flail my arms, I'd go to the gym or play some pickup basketball.
I think there was (maybe is) a disconnect between Microsoft and hardcore gamers. Kinect and Xbox One's initial non-gaming features were an attempt to take Xbox "mainstream". Stop it. Appeal to the core demographic. To their credit, it seems like they've been doing that now.
This is business though. Lots of stupid side products and features are launched to compete with ideas that might take over. If it doesn't, fine but if it does become popular you aren't 5 years behind and dead in the water.
I'm a huge proponent of VR (backer #238 of the Rift on Kickstarter), but I worry VR headsets will end up in the dustbin with the Kinect for this very reason...
I remember buying a Wii just for the gesture control capabilities. I wrote a whole VJ performance app based on Wii gestures, so you could crossfade video and scrub through animations (the video equivalent of a DJ scratching records), just by waving your hands around. I toured with that thing for years... it was so essential to my performance that I stashed a few candles in my bag, so I could use them for IR tracking in case the sensor bar stopped working.
I then bought a Kinect and used it in a couple performances, projecting 3d mapped effects on to the band onstage. Even with VR/AR tech now: it starts with games but then gets co-opted into art and music. Open, hackable hardware is so important for society.
Having games that are fun and allow me to play without plopping down in my sofa is definitely a plus. I get enough sitting done when working.
Gives me some strange feels about the current state of the tech economy. The Kinect is being retired at the same time Amazon and Google are caught up in a dumb contest to see who can produce the best hockey-puck-sized speaker that can add items to your shopping list. As overwhelmingly large as tech giants like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Apple are, they seem mostly resigned to following trends, as opposed to creating new ones.
Don't forget, smartwatches originated from a highly successful Kickstarter campaign. Same can be said for VR. Bitcoin, and blockchain by extension, originated from a white paper published by someone who's still to this day a complete mystery.
Tech giants are very much capable of generating cash, but are damned by their inability to create gold.
This. And thanks to software/hardware patents, the technology will die with the product, or remain dormant until the owner will either decide to make something else with it or (not holding my breath) release it under a FOSS license. In the meantime, like always, landfills in the 3rd world will be inundated by more hardware which could be still perfectly useable if its life didn't depend on the wishes of a single company.
Well that's a silly comment, because by choosing not to make more then there would actually be fewer kinects in landfills than if they had decided to continue manufacturing. The decision to "build more" has absolutely nothing to do with folks deciding to throw away the ones they've already bought.
On one hand, you could see this as fooling around with Kinect tech now requiring a $1000 investment in an iPhone. (Or buying a Kinect used; there are still plenty on the market.)
On the other hand, you could believe in the inevitability of Shenzhen to take the probably $3 part Apple has designed, stick it into a little housing with a micro controller, and commoditize “Kinect Minis” within the year. :)
Apple also offers AR kit which is the same concept with similar APIs.
Another much under-appreciated aspect of Kinect was what an absolutely phenomenal video conferencing system it was - using Skype on Xbox was on par with expensive custom systems. Great speakerphone (that audio recognition) and it would resize the focus on the fly to include all the faces in the room (panning around).
At any rate, the idea lives on in Apple's iPhone X in a much more practical application.
> Don't forget, smartwatches originated from a highly successful Kickstarter campaign.
This is a big stretch, in my opinion. I think we'd have worked out that a screen on our wrist with useful info is nice regardless of what happened on Kickstarter, this wasn't exactly an incredible discovery.
There had been countless fitness tracking watches that aren't really all that far removed from the public want from smart watches from Garmin et al long before Pebble tried their thing too. The barrier was arguably getting efficient SoCs that could last a day doing something useful far more than it was anything to do with crowd funding.
> Tech giants are very much capable of generating cash, but are damned by their inability to create gold.
This is getting a bit silly now.
But you know why it is so, don't you? The allure for an information company of having an always-on, always internet connected, high-sensitivity microphone, running proprietary software doing god knows what, the allure of having such a device in as many homes as possible is only too obvious.
The only thing more shameful than them pushing this garbage is the consumers' willingness to eat it all up.
If you're into software, you could make it exciting. Perhaps write a scraper to strip the audio off porn clips, mix it up with old Khruschev speeches?
Could be a tactic to fight systems like these - overwhelm them with garbage data.
I think that's the problem, I figure it was meant to increase XBox game licensing money, not turn a direct profit.
Also don't forget that Sony Ericsson released the MBW-100 smartwatch[1] several years before Kickstarter existed ... so I'm not sure how they could have originated on Kickstarter.
[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=385SISfXUNU
If you want to kill this, you need a cooperate culture, that anonymizes project critic and punishes claims of authorship to critique.
the problem is if google doesn't go into the "speaker with a voice assistant" space, they allow amazon to possibly gain dominance in said space. this is why everyone wants to get in on drone delivery, self-driving cars, vr, etc..
and while "creative", the kinect wasn't a thing microsoft invented either. in fact, primesense, the company that created the original kinect got bought out by apple, and basically that tech is in the iphone x now.
I suppose at least the data is worth a lot towards better voice control efforts.
Before I left we were doing the work to transition to v2 and were well aware that it was not an earner for MS, but I think the prevailing notion was this was too important to the research community and MS was in it for the long game hoping for it to take off in other industries.
In any case, I reached out to a friend there who tells me they were aware of this eventuality for some time and have another option (smaller, more accurate) that they are in the process of migrating to.
Their dominance seems to have further pervaded the notion that utility and viability = profitability within this system.
(and the hockey puck sounds pretty... pretty dumb)
Youre either misrepresenting or woefully misunderstanding this. The echo et al are no more about selling a $50 shopping list speaker than when Amazon/Barnes and Noble/Sony were going at over $50 e-ink readers.
> Don't forget, smartwatches originated from a highly successful Kickstarter campaign.
Smartwatches have been a techno-futurist pie-in-the-sky product for almost 50 years now.
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If anything, it's surprising Microsoft kept building and subsidizing these things for as long as they did.
I don't think you're giving these companies adequate credit for their innovation. :-)
It's worth remembering that the Echo, a voice-powered home assistant that can be spoken to anywhere in a room ("far-field" voice recognition), was novel when Amazon introduced it. Similarly, the digital e-ink reader was novel when Amazon launched the Kindle. Two other concepts that seem novel to me are the Amazon Go stores (checkout-less shopping) and Amazon Prime Air (automated drone delivery), both works-in-progress. Consider Amazon Web Services (est. 2006) and the cloud services boom.
Amazon created the first devices/services that resulted in the trends for home assistants and ebook readers (etc.), so I don't think it's fair to name them as "mostly resigned to following trends".
Similarly, although Google seems to have followed Amazon's lead with respect to home assistants, it's certainly innovating in the capabilities of their service, and in other areas. Google's voice assistant has access to incredible amounts of information, presumably powered by Google's search and understanding of questions and context. While both Alexa and Google can answer "When was Abraham Lincoln born?", only Google can more difficult questions like "Who was the second CEO of Microsoft?" (per my test today). However, none of the offerings can yet answer "When was the second CEO of Microsoft born?" Boiling the situation down to shopping lists ignores the capability variation in products.
Of course every company will follow trends to some extent, since to do otherwise is to give up a potential market segment. Companies don't exist per se to create trends; they exist to capitalize on business opportunities. A lot of the big tech companies have expertise they can leverage to enter new tech segments, or have related services that they can integrate. E.g., if Apple has Siri and the Apple TV, then a home assistant may still be a sensible play, even if Amazon did it first.
Trying to create a new trend is risky and requires large investment. For every hit like the Echo, you might strike out like the Fire Phone; for every hit like the Pixel phone you might strike out like Google Glass or have moderate success like Kinect. It makes sense for companies to create offerings when there's a proven model to follow in addition to investing in new innovative ideas.
If following is the only thing a company does, then you might judge them as not being innovative; but before you do that, you should look at the innovative things they're trying too, such as the Glass, the Kindle, the Kinect. Apple has been incredibly innovative in their phone design and security features: the first to offer a touch-based phone with no keyboard (as far as I know); the first to offer fingerprint-based unlock instead of PIN code unlock (so convenient!), and now face-recognition based unlock; Siri may have been the first useful voice assistant. Apple's security and privacy has been industry-leading, e.g. Secure Enclave. Apple CarPlay is a great experience and surpasses every other car integration system I've used.
I believe that the reason all of the named companies have continued to be successful and remain market leaders is because they are innovating in products and services.
The speaker thing was Amazon creating a trend (or fad if you really see it that way).
I personally spearheaded a couple of projects to make it work with the Vive in this way.
Unfortunately, the Kinect's tendency to screw up leg motion, SDK's and API's that read like an old grimoire of Black Magick and worked about just as well, as well as it's proprietary skeleton detection drivers, which prevented me from getting in and fixing a lot of these issues, which caused the company I worked for to drop it completely.
a focus on 'developers developers developers' could've really saved this thing.
These are solutions I found when looking into leg sensors for a Taekwondo VR training game. I feel we're approaching a technology intersection between self-driving cars and VR, in the need to map physical spaces and the objects therein. I keep waiting for someone to bring in eTemplate laser scanning tech to bridge the gap, but nobody has. I fear most people see these as entirely separate domains with little overlap.
However, a lack of MacOS support, terrible drivers for Windows that worked about half the time with my Unity rig, non-native Unity support, et al, really messed up a lot of the longer-term plans I had for it, and caused it to not be reliable enough to ever use in a production environment.
The developers make or break a piece of hardware, and while I get that it was mainly an XBOX device, when it failed to make a serious splash there, they could've saved the hardware by working with its high-demand for a ton of different high-tech solutions and provided consistently better SDK's and API's.
Good riddance, because hopefully we'll get something better. Shame, because Microsoft really had a product that spoke to higher-end developers and filled a phenomenal void for a low-cost alternative to brutally high-cost motion capture and natural interaction systems.
Hopefully the structure sensor [ https://store.structure.io/store ] can help to fill this void.
In the meantime, I'm guessing it means that the software support isn't going to get any better. :(
After getting all of our motion capture done, we wanted to see what else we could do with it. I stumbled across a [1]repo from a few years ago that live-streams the depth data as a point cloud system in the browser. So we cleaned up the code, set up a kinect to point at our office entrance, and now have it live-streaming in the header of our [2]website! It's a bit too heavy on mobile, so we're currently working on a fallback.
[1] https://github.com/jawj/websocket-kinect
[2] https://l2d.co/
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