Microsoft Kinect

I had both the original Kinect (xbox 360) and then Xbox One Kinect. I found that I was able to find a lot more libraries and projects around the original Kinect. Sadly, I misplaced the original 360 Kinect when I moved to a new house and have never been able to find it. I still have the xbox one Kinect. But it seems that there isn't lot of of development done around it. Even though it had more sensors and had better imaging.

During the pandemic I took my old Xbox over to my parents with the Kinect and used Skype on Xbox so they could see their grandkids on their TV and it was like room to room chatting. I miss that.

I’ve been having tons of fun messing around using the depth sensor data from a Kinect for Xbox to create procedural visuals. It’s been growing and growing to the point of now having 4 or 5 different input methods and accidentally discovering new emergent effects based on different combinations of parameters. Also threw in intel’s 3D rendering engine Embree because why not. Anyways, this playlist documents the progress in chronological order... https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvzGE7O7DizdvCEOrwaVNcY_o...

My oldest kid is just aging into gaming. We’ve got the Disneyland Adventures game and a Kinect for her. Can confirm, Kinect is dead. You can only get them refurbished now, they’re no longer manufactured. The new consoles no longer support Kinect, we had to dig out an original Xbox One for her. When the Kinect launched, Microsoft had trouble getting a critical mass of players that would attract developers. Without developers adding support to their games, Microsoft had a hard time marketing the device. This led to them bundling it with the Xbox One, but consumers were upset that they were being forced to buy the accessory. I’m impressed they held out as long as they did, but eventually Microsoft caved and removed the Kinect from the bundle and dropped the price of the Xbox One. At that point, the Kinect was essentially dead. They quietly stopped manufacturing them and the new consoles no longer support them (though I’ve heard rumors you can buy 3rd party USB adaptors). It’s a shame. That device is SO much more engaging and approachable for kids than trying to teach them to use a controller.

I'll +1 the quality of the workout with Supernatural. I was a heavy XBox fitness user and loved the workouts available, along with the use of the Kinect to gameify and make sure I wasn't cheating. Supernatural offers the same thing to me. Workouts are intense, hard, and fun somehow. It took a little work to make sure I was timing things right and making the right motion for my moves to count, but the result is fun. To make it even better, I connect bluetooth audio to my home theater AVR and enjoy a much better music experience to get pumped up.

The problem with the v2, from someone who had a boss that loved the kinect and used it in retail environments experimentally wasn't the new tech. The new tech was/is amazing. The level of detail you can get from the v2 dwarfs the v1 on every axis. The problem was that it ONLY had a windows SDK and most of the people who did amazing work outside of games and the xbox with the kinect v1 were using it with macs and linux in tools like openframeworks and processing. The v1 was developed outside microsoft and primesense and there were SDKs that were compatible cross platform. Tons of artists dove right in. The KinectV2 only offered a windows sdk, and that's what killed it in the 'secondary market'. Luckily now we have libfreenect2 ( https://github.com/OpenKinect/libfreenect2 ) but that came too late for most of us.

Related to that and that feeling that we aren't doing much more than the same features and these are just getting worse at those features, I think it is an easy question how much of this has been a "law of diminishing returns" and that so many new features come at the cost of the understanding and recognition of the old features. Maybe we didn't really want all that many new features and developers and product managers trying to justify their budgets' existence has been part of the problem (spending too much money developing new stuff is not a problem often expected here on HN). I know that I sometimes lament the loss of Windows Phone 7 and Xbox 360-era voice recognition (proto-Cortana). It was absolutely stupid, had very few features, but it ran entirely on the device itself and was rock solid at recognizing the features it did support. You could just about whisper "Xbox pause" to a Kinect in the middle of an action scene of a loud movie with surround sound and expect it to respond immediately on a dime. But also it never seemed to accidentally trigger.

One of the things I find very frustrating about Microsoft (and to a lesser extent Google) is how they will walk back nearly anything at the slightest pushback and cancel anything that isn't an immediate overnight success. The Kinect was really, really cool tech, and I dream about what could have been if MS had not made the Kinect thst came with the XBox One optional pretty much right after it was announced.

In the niche area of VR fitness, I think the Quest 2, or the Quest 1 for that matter, was already there. It is the killer app...but maybe the only one for those who use the Quest that way: this morning I did 45 minutes in FitXR and another 25 minutes in BeatSaber, I have a few other fitness apps I use sometimes but I've never even explored the gaming aspect of the system. I don't want to go back to the way it was before the Quest 1 came out, gyms aren't that convenient for me anymore and everything else I could think of to do at home wasn't cutting it. DDR was as really great fitness app back in the late 90s, early 00s, similar experience, but it required insanely expensive hardware if you wanted to do it at home at any decent quality (rather than just a novelty for a few parties). The Quest has none of that problem (though most of your work is in your arms rather than your legs). It is also too bad Microsoft didn't go the fitness route for Kinect, that worked fairly well also in getting sore at least.

> Kinect was released (November 4, 2010) a little before this article and presented another vision of future, but the market didn't think so The Kinect has pretty much dried up for video games, but the company that developed the first version of the Kinect for Microsoft was later purchased by Apple, and their technology underpins the FaceID tech that appears in every iOS device these days. (Apple has also had rear-facing Lidar on their iPads & iPhones for a few years now, and I believe that it is also an evolution of the Kinect tech, but I don't know for sure.) I am disappointed that it withered away for video games, since it was really interesting & fun technology.

Also a lot of the sensors that Kinect brought to market first and a lot of very Kinect-like sensor packages have just made their way into mainstream usage. Any device with "Face ID" or "Windows Hello" support owes a lot to Kinect and uses a comparable sensor package to the first gen Xbox 360 Kinect (though usually a much shorter depth of field because it's just doing facial recognition rather than full room recognition). You can buy USB cameras from Intel and Logitech with comparable sensor packages to a Kinect. For Microsoft's hardware efforts that is often seen as its own win when they can take something people don't know they need, package it in a commodity way to get competitors to take interest and build their own versions: The scroll wheel on the mouse went from an R&D project at Microsoft to the Office team realizing it was the future of productivity and bundling mice with scroll wheels with Office to now just about no manufacturer would think to build a mouse without a scroll wheel. The Kinect used console gaming as a trojan horse to commoditize thousands of dollars of lab sensors into an integrated $150 accessory to the Xbox 360 and now there are versions of that sensor package in laptops and smartphones and VR headsets and so much more. Kinect as a gaming brand may be dead (for now? AR/MR gaming has always been one for recurring fads, it may come around again, who knows), but the legacy of Kinect lives on in hardware all around us. The hardware didn't just go back t…

>Kinect => It's not dead ??? Is it alive? It very much has an immensely passionate community of students and hobbyists using it in ways well past its intended use (e.g. it's some of the cheapest mocap hardware you can buy). But I don't think you've been able to officially purchase one for 4+ years now. Hard to call that "alive" in a business sense. Honestly a real shame that Xbox hasn't pivoted it into some other team that can market it towards creators. In particular the whole "VTuber" phenomenon may benefit form a cheap(ish), dedicated motion tracking device instead of relying on a high end iPhone or fanagling with some generic webcam.

+1 We encourage you to shoot some content with a Kinect DK (or iPhone) and upload it to our platform to test it out yourself.

Kinect is definitely disruptive. Which is all the more impressive considering the Wii has been on the market for some time, yet Kinect is not just a Wii motion control imitation (as the Playstation Move is), it's something similar but very different. It's probably too soon to tell how significant Kinect will end up being, it'll probably be follow-on generations of Kinect games which will prove whether it'll be a game changer or a dud.