21 ms·

Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect

670 points by tlarkworthy 9y ago

darrylb42 9y ago
When I had an apartment I didn't buy one because I had no room. Now I have a house the xbox one S needed special pricey cables, and there were no games. So I never bought one. I really like the idea of the Kinect but I couldn't use it when it was big.
sotojuan 9y ago
Reliance on Kinect and always online killed the Xbox One. Sure, they backpedaled but it was too late. They really messed up.
- endorphone 9y ago
  Positioning at introduction is what hobbled the Xbox One -- we mostly forget it now, but while the PS4 was introduced as a gaming device -- all about the games and for gamers -- the Xbox One was introduced as a cable pass-thru device with augmented TV watching, a smart livingroom, an NFL experience, etc. The gaming seemed almost ancillary, and of course classic television was dying (especially among the target market) so a smart TV guide hardly was compelling. It was just a massive misstep, and was years too late for its focus. They've regrouped but the PS4 has retained the lead from that early head-start.
  - ballenf 9y ago
    The misstep for a non-hardcore gamer like me was that they didn't really deliver on the home entertainment hub either. It was a device halfway to nowhere. The extra $1 it would have cost to include a digital broadcast tuner (vs. a $75 add on; down to $50 these days) would have been a big draw to cord cutters. Second, the removal of the windows media tools that the 360 had made it less usable as a streaming device. Felt like design by disjointed committee. I bought it as a media hub (and for the Forza series), but ended up being somewhat abandoned by MS as the focus shifted, understandably, to hardcore gamers.
- larrik 9y ago
  The Xbox One is hardly dead, though.
  - ekianjo 9y ago
    Not dead but a massive failure compared to what the Xbox360 did on the market.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - partiallypro 9y ago
      If I'm not mistaken the Xbox One and PS4 both sold at faster paces than their predecessors.
      - ekianjo 9y ago
        The Xbox One? I'd be very surprised if it did. The PS4, certainly, because the PS3 was a pretty bad experience for Sony.
        partiallypro 9y ago
        Yes, and as of current, and the Xbox One X is the fastest selling pre-order in Xbox history. Each generation has sold faster than then next. I think this is largely attributable (in the XB360 -> XB1; PS3 -> PS4) to the fact that there was such a large gap between generations, so there was pent up demand. Don't mistake "faster selling" with more overall sales by the end of the generation. As for the PS3 being a bad experience for Sony, that only applies to the first units. By the end of the generation, Sony was almost parity with Microsoft on units sold. So too has Xbox One started to catch up with PS4 (in the U.S.) Microsoft still sells more software per unit though, if I am not mistaken.
  - sotojuan 9y ago
    Xbox line has always lost MS money (even back in the glory days of the 360) and Xbox One has lagged way behind PS4 since it launched. "Dead" was an exaggeration, I admit. But it has mediocre if not poor sales.
- cwyers 9y ago
  There's nothing dead about the Xbox One. Yes, the PS4 outsells it. But most games releases are on both systems, and Microsoft comes through with some solid exclusives ever year. I have an Xbox One and a PS4, and with games that come out on both systems, I play those on the Xbox One because Sony's UI is frustrating to me and it just seems like the software is less polished.
  - sotojuan 9y ago
    Meh, don't want to get into a console war argument, sorry. I'll just say this: Xbox One is doing poorly compared to PS4 and its exclusives are becoming nothing special. This is especially true this year when many high profile console games are either Sony exclusive or Japanese so they are not on Xbox One. If Microsoft had launched Xbox One in its current state, it would be neck to neck with PS4. Unfortunately they spent its first year pushing for Kinect, an "entertainment center", and always-online requirements.
  - Retric 9y ago
    XBox is missing several exclusives like Uncharted 4, Horizon: Zero Dawn, and Persona 5 so there are plenty of games on just one system. IMO, if you have both then it might not seem like a big deal but PS4 seems to have better exclusives and it's consistently selling 2x as much. It's also at 1/3 as many sales as the Xbox 360 so 'dead' may be over rated but it's not in a great place.
    - cwyers 9y ago
      I have bought and played all of those games, and they're good games. 2017 has been a better year for PS4 exclusives than Xbox One, although maybe I just feel that way because I like the Forza Horizon games more than the Forza Motorsport games and I suck at Cuphead. There's still plenty of Xbox One exclusives that I'm happy I've played.
      - zabuni 9y ago
        It doesn't help that Microsoft cancelled a large amount of their second party titles like Scalebound.
- Ralfp 9y ago
  Their advertisement summing to "look at all those awesome extra features that you'll never use because they are US-only!" while at same time Sony advertised with "for the players" focus and solid, LOCALISED exclusives didn't do them any favors outside of US either.
- nikolay 9y ago
  Xbox One never relied on Kinect.
  - sp332 9y ago
    MS did threaten to require the Kinect to be plugged in or the console wouldn't boot. They reversed that decision before launch though. http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/163796-xbox-one-no-longer-requires-kinect-but-itll-still-come-in-the-box-and-youll-still-pay-500 http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/163796-xbox-one-no-longer-...
mattmattmatt 9y ago
Was really hoping to see more non-xbox kinect uses over the years. More art installations, more retail, more whatever. Sad to see it go.
- th0ma5 9y ago
  The original version worked well on Linux. They then had the skeleton detector and such in a proprietary library. I think there are ways to use the newer versions, but they messed with it all enough to make it rather cumbersome.
  - lostgame 9y ago
    This [skeleton data being proprietary] is one of the nails in the coffin for sure. I get that MS would like to keep developers into it's little Windows / XBOX box, but forcing me to keep a Windows installation for the sole purpose of using your hardware is a great way to get developers looking for an alternative.
- Qworg 9y ago
  You'll find that Kinects are powering far more exhibits and retail art projects than you'd know.
  - blt 9y ago
    Not to mention a big chunk of robotics research since the Kinect was released.
  - mattmattmatt 9y ago
    Totally agree and recognize that. But a bummer to see it disappear into the background (and thus get discontinued as a result).
- nitrogen 9y ago
  I ran a startup selling controllers to make this easier, but never got much traction and eventually went back to the full-time employment world. One problem is that games are a pretty weak application of the technology, but you need gaming-scale numbers of units to have reasonable costs.
rbanffy 9y ago
I remember the Milo demo. The mix of overpromise and under-delivery is astonishingly consistent.
- grabcocque 9y ago
  There was a, um, Molyneux effect to consider there too.
  - rbanffy 9y ago
    And how about the Longhorn concept from 2003? It took years for the rest of the market to catch up to that and Windows 10 is still not quite up there.
  - reificator 9y ago
    I'm glad I didn't know who Molyneux was when I first played Fable, because I had a great time.
- tnolet 9y ago
  Molyneux gave a pretty interesting and insightful interview on the whole Kinect/Milo debacle http://www.ign.com/articles/2017/04/11/peter-molyneux-kinect-was-a-disaster-trainwreck-a-ign-unfiltered http://www.ign.com/articles/2017/04/11/peter-molyneux-kinect...
cwyers 9y ago
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.
- chrisfosterelli 9y ago
  I received one as a gift, and while I _really_ love the voice controls I don't think I've ever actually used any of the other features on the device.
  - notyourwork 9y ago
    Same - I use it to talk with friends in a party while playing games together. Much better than headset in certain situations.
- zitterbewegung 9y ago
  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.
- chaostheory 9y ago
  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.
  - 9y ago
larrik 9y ago
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. But it could have been so much better.
- WorldMaker 9y ago
  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.
  - dawnerd 9y ago
    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).
    - flanbiscuit 9y ago
      this? https://youtu.be/uUE_DaM8ymk?t=19s https://youtu.be/uUE_DaM8ymk?t=19s
eaguyhn 9y ago
This was pretty cool - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qhXQ_1CQjg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qhXQ_1CQjg
shravj 9y ago
I knew this was coming for the past few months as the supply was dwindling and resellers were selling them for $45 (half of MSRP). Pretty disappointing since I enjoyed working with these for a project. Have to find an alternative now going forward.
JoeDaDude 9y ago
Most unfortunate. I was hoping to see the technology applied to VR. One of my complaints/observations about VR is that you are a disembodied viewpoint in the VR environment. Something like a Kinect mocap system would add bodily presence in the VR environment.
- stephengillie 9y ago
  There are open-source projects to allow a Vive to leverage Kinect motion tracking. And HTC is developing a full body motion tracker. These are solutions I found when looking into leg sensors for a Taekwondo VR training game. I feel we're approaching a technology intersection between self-driving cars and VR, in the need to map physical spaces and the objects therein. I keep waiting for someone to bring in eTemplate laser scanning tech to bridge the gap, but nobody has. I fear most people see these as entirely separate domains with little overlap.
  - simplyinfinity 9y ago
    why use the kinect when you can use leapmotion for ~100$ IIRC ( only for hand gesture recognition, that is )
- guardian5x 9y ago
  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.
- lostgame 9y ago
  >> 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.
wintorez 9y ago
Looks like Microsoft is on a killing spree these days.
Qworg 9y ago
I'm sad to see this day arrive, even though the community knew the writing was on the wall. As the first truly affordable, mass market depth sensor, it was a shame it couldn't get a second life as a standalone product. It also looks like I'm not going to sell any more books. ;)
dang 9y ago
Url changed from https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/25/16542870/microsoft-kinect-dead-stop-manufacturing https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/25/16542870/microsoft-kinec..., which points to this.
binthere 9y ago
It is still very useful for an affordable mocap solution. I recommend buying one now if you ever want to do it.
mtgx 9y ago
Is there a "Microsoft product graveyard" website we can check out, too?
lowbloodsugar 9y ago
> "Why press a button to duck, when you can just duck?" Why sit on your arse and turn a steering wheel when you can just run forty miles to work? When someone says "Why do X when you can just do Y?" its usually because "just doing Y" is simpler or easier. Turns out that ducking is neither simpler, nor easier.
- ksk 9y ago
  But it is simpler and easier. You don't have to learn the controls, and actions you know and are familiar with translate exactly into game-space. That sort of game interface can be fun for a certain segment/genre. People still enjoy playing on the Wii. I would concede that its not mainstream, but who knows, maybe we just need to make the right game.
wolco 9y ago
Perhaps they were early. I'm still using my wii daily.
- eric_h 9y ago
  Really? The original Wii? What do you play?
  - gcbw2 9y ago
    last time i powered it on was a few months ago when i found out there was a Sam&Max point'n click game for it!
  - wolco 9y ago
    Excite bots and trackmania are great racing games. Also the wii fitness and related sport games. Original broke but I got a red one to replace it.
feelin_googley 9y ago
Most interesting bit of Kinect history, IMO, omitted by the article: https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2373107,00.asp https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2373107,00.asp
- wildpeaks 9y ago
  Especially as it was a sharp contrast to the history of the Wiimote, where Nintendo had had the opposite reaction and tried to lock DIY makers out once they realized people were using it for unintended purposes. I'm glad Microsoft was smarter about this, it enabled a lot of otherwise costly to develop ideas to emerge at the time and the gaming use of the Kinect is almost anecdotal in retrospect.
robotresearcher 9y ago
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. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/video/body-part-recognition-and-the-development-of-kinect/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/video/body-part-rec...
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  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.
  - peterlk 9y ago
    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.
    - cryptoz 9y ago
      Similar deal as Sony removing PS3 features after launch: people found a product they loved, for reasons not envisioned by Sony, who was then hell-bent on shutting it down. Even though it seems like Sony's interest to foster a community of high-tech nerds interested in AI and parallel processing, and even though it seems like it's Microsoft's interest in fostering a community of robotics and computer vision nerds, it turns out the Giant Corporations need lock-down control on products and have no long-term vision for supporting ecosystems or communities.
      - 9y ago
busterarm 9y ago
I wish the USB adapter weren't also $40. I've wanted one for a while for computer vision projects and $40-50 is a fantastic price. Instead I'm looking at maybe getting a 360 Kinect (Certified Refurbished) at $40 and $10 for the usb adapter.
macspoofing 9y ago
Big disappointment. In an age of Echo, and Google Home, I can't understand how Microsoft couldn't make Kinect work. Also, whatever you may think of Kinect, at least they tried something different. The new XboxOne X is just a spec bump. No attempt at innovating any other aspect of the console.
lostgame 9y ago
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. Hopefully the structure sensor [ https://store.structure.io/store 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. :(
- philnelson 9y ago
  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.
  - Qworg 9y ago
    How's the skeletonization these days? Still using NiTE?
nikolay 9y ago
Really? You kill a product right after Apple released something similar on iPhone and glories it?
- grzm 9y ago
  What Apple product/tech are you thinking of? The two off the top of my head are FaceID and ARKit, and both seem quite a stretch to me. I feel like I’m missing something obvious.
  - wmkn 9y ago
    Years ago Apple bought the company, PrimeSense, that developed the technology for the first generation Kinect (the one based on IR structured light). From the description Apple gave of FaceID during the keynote I'm pretty certain that FaceID is pretty much Kinect in an iPhone. Of course the application of it is totally different.
    - grzm 9y ago
      I can see that part, which is why I mentioned FaceID. I just have a hard time seeing it as comparable with respect to the range of the Kinect both in distance and application, as you point out. That’s what motivated my original comment. Are you aware of anything to the contrary? Definitely interested in learning more if so, given the Kinect is going away. I can also see Apple potentially doing more with this in the future, though they’re not there yet. It seems more like Microsoft hasn’t been interested in promoting the Kinect (it’s been out for years) or applying the tech elsewhere, and they’re just shutting it down, the timing being coincidental.
  - Vekz 9y ago
    The iPhoneX has essentially a mini Kinect sensor set built into the infamous "black notch" at the top which powers FaceID
    - thefalcon 9y ago
      Emphasis on the mini: that applies to the kind of range it gets too thanks to limited power levels.
Dowwie 9y ago
Hey Microsoft. Why not open source the whole enchilada?
- owebmaster 9y ago
  Because probably it would take a long time investment to make the code publishable.
- echan00 9y ago
  Stopping manufacturing doesn't mean they don't value the IP. They spent a whole lot of money on this technology!
  - tinus_hn 9y ago
    Better let it safely collect dust in a very dark cupboard!
    - sp332 9y ago
      The (updated) article points out that they're still using this stuff in Hololens, Windows Hello, and other gesture-control stuff. I think some of it has made it to the various VR headsets that are coming out for Windows this month.
      - WorldMaker 9y ago
        Also, stopping manufacturing doesn't mean they couldn't restart manufacturing if a demand or an application showed up. The updated article also mentions that the secondary markets are flooded with Kinect v2s for half retail price ($45), which is a pretty good reason to stop manufacturing if the demand isn't there. It also doesn't preclude Microsoft building a Kinect v3 in the future. (It doesn't even preclude Microsoft building a Kinect v3 in secret in the present.)
Bjorkbat 9y ago
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.
- microcolonel 9y ago
  > ridiculously cheap cost I think that's the problem, I figure it was meant to increase XBox game licensing money, not turn a direct profit.
  - Benjammer 9y ago
    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.
    - Tyr42 9y ago
      Wii, and in general Nintendo consoles are not sold at a loss.
    - dcole2929 9y ago
CrankyBear 9y ago
They were still building those things!?
enuamah 9y ago
Well they have VR now so it makes sense.
cattleprodigy 9y ago
My favorite Kinect art installation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD7gk2kHP3g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD7gk2kHP3g
- skeletonjelly 9y ago
  We were going to do this for a big new hospital in Melbourne but the guy running the project was a jerk and didn't go with us. It's a great idea for kids hospitals!
coverband 9y ago
IMHO, Kinect is still the best when it comes to sports, exercise, and dance simulation games.
_jdams 9y ago
Sad about the Kinect, but don't interpret this as Microsoft/Xbox failing. They are actually doing a fantastic job with the Xbox brand. The X (scorpio) is launching soon, and they are releasing a bunch of older titles into their ever-expanding backwards compatibility library. In addition, developers are pushing out graphics/performance update patches for the popular titles on the X, and recently overhauled the Xbox UI - it is extremely snappy now and customizable.
dalfonso 9y ago
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.
- tchock23 9y ago
  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...
  - make3 9y ago
    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
    - agar 9y ago
      Have you actually played VR games recently? The most popular games are flight simulators and first person shooters where people walk around (Elite Dangerous, Eve: Valkyrie, FSX, Onward, Pavlov, From Other Suns). The best games released, Lone Echo and Echo Arena, take place in zero-gravity environments with highly non-constant speed and no teleportation. Any game that gets released without joystick/trackpad locomotion will get a flood of angry message board postings. Nausea is certainly a concern, but huge strides have been made in addressing it for the vast majority of players.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
jlebrech 9y ago
they should make a kinect for pc/mac
- partiallypro 9y ago
  You can use the Kinect on PC.
  - jlebrech 9y ago
    it should be better marketed for PC, for example in the vein of google home or amazon echo. you could have a little machine that motivates you to do a workout for example, that can also connect to a pc for more advanced apps.
Thetawaves 9y ago
Is there anything else that fills the voice recognition "xbox watch netflix" "xbox volume up" space? Going back to a physical remote feels like I just took a step back in time.
- superbaconman 9y ago
  You can use the headset with Cortana for some things, though I'm not sure what all it can do.
  - gxh8N 9y ago
    Everything that you could do with Kinect + most Cortana features.
- gxh8N 9y ago
  The headset ... Sorry. I'm suspecting/hope that someone will integrate Alexa/google home/HK Invoke with XBox. Should be soooo straightforward. I'd do it myself for a hackathon.
FussyZeus 9y ago
I'm somewhat confused, are they talking about just the 360 Kinect or the current ones too?
- skeletonjelly 9y ago
  v1 (round corners) which was for the 360 and v2 (squared edges) for the One
jwilliams 9y ago
Sad to see this - I recently talked to a startup that was using Kinect for at-home physical therapy. By no means a replacement for PT, but really a huge opportunity for people that didn't have regular/sufficient access to therapy. Hopefully something equivalent can cut through.
cmsonger 9y ago
I wonder what the "followon product" discussions were like and what they said "no" to as a next generation. I mean this seems like an idea whose time will come. What could they have built if they were targeting a product to release before Christmas?
poyu 9y ago
This is quite sad, seeing so many amazing hacked together project that uses the Kinect. I bought a fairly new one at thrift shop for only $15 dollar (!!) a few weeks back.
mcemilg 9y ago
There are lots of university projects developing with this device. This is very sad decision for them. I hope it will back soon.
prophesi 9y ago
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. [1] https://github.com/jawj/websocket-kinect https://github.com/jawj/websocket-kinect [2] https://l2d.co/ https://l2d.co/
- derptron 9y ago
  I'd say it's a bit too heavy in general.
Nanite 9y ago
Matterport's camera system, a low cost alternative for laser based systems , for 3d mapping interiors, was originally based on a kinect hack back in 2010. Not sure where they are getting their current sensors, but they're doing quite well, the underlying technology is definitly not dead. https://matterport.com/pro2-3d-camera/ https://matterport.com/pro2-3d-camera/
phdsolutions 9y ago
We built a commercially viable product with the 2nd generation Kinect that calculates cubic dimensions of packages for the Transportation/Logistics industry. As others have already stated, the sensor capabilities at the price point offered are unbeatable. For context: our device is capable of measuring the dimensions to a 5mm accuracy on cuboidal (box-shaped) objects sized between 60mm and 1200mm (approx 2.4" to 48") The device has passed certification by some pretty rigid government bodies in North America that spent a significant amount of time evaluating it to ensure it measures correctly ALL the time. Of course we always knew this day would come eventually, but it kinda sucks that it had to be today though. Time to buy up those surplus refurbs I suppose..
skizm 9y ago
I assume they were selling this under cost in order to sell more games (software) which is where they make most of their money. Selling it as a standalone piece of tech would probably require a price hike ultimately making it less appealing and at the end of they day they probably projected they wouldn't move enough units to make it worth it.
housel 9y ago
Orbbec Astra (https://orbbec3d.com/product-astra/ https://orbbec3d.com/product-astra/) is still a viable option for applications (such as robotics) that need an RGBD camera. The body-tracking SDK is still in beta at the moment.
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Nicholas7900 9y ago
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Nicholas7900 9y ago
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billphipps 9y ago
waste of time
JaRail 9y ago
I think this speaks to a change in direction to VR/AR systems. It seems pretty clear that long-term tracking solutions will include face/body tracking. Oculus hopes their camera-based tracking can be extended to track full bodies and arbitrary objects. Headsets are getting eye-tracking for foveated rendering. I'll miss the kinect but it doesn't play nice with newer tracking systems. They confuse each other. That makes it difficult to use in combination with a Vive. I'm guessing they aren't very reliable multi-camera systems either. Unlike the Vive, they don't have a timing mechanism to avoid confusing each other.
amigoingtodie 9y ago
I just bought and returned two used Kinects from gamestop. They were $28 each. Tried to use the native Windows 10 3-d scanning program with both and hotrible results. It was nothing like the MS demo footage. The color image would not map properly to the point-cloud. The second camera was better, but still 'off'. I wonder how reliable the miniaturized Apple version will be, particularly being knocked around.
rsp1984 9y ago
What many don't know: The exact chips and technology behind the Kinect v1 (as developed by PrimeSense) are still in use today in many products: We (that is -- shameless plug -- my company DotProduct) combine a Primesense Carmine sensor (basically a smaller version of the Kinect) with an Android tablet and our software to create a self-contained portable 3D scanner (www.dotproduct3d.com). Occipital has created their own version of the sensor which they call the "Structure" sensor, but it's still based on Kinect/PrimeSense tech (www.structure.io). Matterport (a YC company) is using the tech in a tripod based scanner to create 3D interior walkthroughs (www.matterport.com). The reason these sensors are still in use is largely that PrimeSense (at the time they released the Kinect) was technologically about 7 years ahead of every other 3D camera manufacturer in the market. Only very recently we're starting to see sensors that rival the Kinect/Carmine in terms of overall quality.
- nh2 9y ago
  > Only very recently we're starting to see sensors that rival the Kinect/Carmine in terms of overall quality. Can you make an example of such alternatives? Are they barebones sensors, or full hardware a consumer can buy?
  - gxh8N 9y ago
    Doesn't answer your question directly, but I would assume that an example is the new iPhone X face unlock sensor, since PrimeSense was acquired by Apple.
donatj 9y ago
I still love my Kinect. It came out at the end of the 360's lifetime, so I waited for the Xbox One to get one which was sadly a mistake. Games supporting Kinect on Xbox One are limited to say the least. I am still however enamored with the automatic login. It sees me all the way across the room and logs me in. It's wonderful. It used to work even better with the first gen controllers which had identifier IR lights in them. My friend and I could swap controllers and continue to play the same side of the screen. It was truly magical. The gen 2 "S" controllers however eliminated the IR lights.
gerdesj 9y ago
"Launched in 2010 with a $500 million marketing campaign" I am very, very, far from being a MS apologist but I think that dropping Kinect is a really stupid idea, strategically. MS have dropped quite a few balls recently and this is another one. No doubt in the boardroom this will be an obvious slash to balance the books but it is a bloody stupid idea when you look a bit wider. This thing was/is a bit of a game changer - not really new, per se, but very useful in quite a few areas. Quietly, many groups in many areas of research and development have used this thing to do things that border on sci fi. I hope Kinect is dropped somewhere else - it is just good enough to work well.
- burnte 9y ago
  Kinect is the same thing today that touch screens were in the 80s; touted as a revolution that will take over everywhere, then people realize sitting there waving your arms for yours is not enjoyable, and then it finds a niche and stabilizes at a much smaller size than everyone expected.
wiseleo 9y ago
This is sad news. I love playing dance games with Kinect. The "Dance Central" series is brutally accurate in its judging. I remember seeing a demo of Project Natal, which was Kinect's codename. It deeply impressed me because it looked like technology from the future. In fact, I bought an Xbox 360 instead of Xbox One because I wanted to play those specific games and they like other original Kinect titles are only supported on the 360 Platform.
burntrelish1273 9y ago
Ah, the Kinect... platform for the first Matterport revision. (Matt B. is so next-level ridiculously creative, Adam Savage would tip his fedora.) Matterport is a really neat mesh/texture capture and stitching platform that I only saw rough demos run based on multiple fixed CCTVs to do forensic 3D scene reconstruction from UC Davis researchers some years before. Also, a first-hand story for this category: Once upon a time, next door to my grandparents house in SJ/Los Gatos region, there lived a renter... not any renter, but a corporate/PhD/engineer whom quit his job to start a startup. After some casual conversation, he mentioned he was working on then something stealth-mode involving machine vision and 3D screen interfacing (think Kinect meets Wii controllers). Many Maybachs, Merc S-series and Aston Martins came by to due-diligence and meet said entrepreneur's startup, team and tech at this rental 3-BD with a dedicated meeting room near Hwy 85. The odd thing was, I never heard what happened to him and has baby. That is until I ran into someone whom did some work for him several years later. (The Valley is a very small place; heck, yours truly toured Woz'es and coworker's homes under construction when I was like 7, but I was more interested in the steep road (Harwood IIRC) out front for high-speed skateboarding/bicycling.) Anyhow, it turns out, the night before the demo, the CEO made a source code change or something that broke the build. And, there weren't backups because they weren't using a (D)VCS. (Ouch.) I think it was acquired for an "undisclosed sum" for IP and wound down IIRC. What sucks is having to go back to work, kind of a tech "bar closing walk-of-shame," but there's always next time.
bitmapbrother 9y ago
I've lost track on how many consumer products Microsoft has abandoned over the years. Once they kill their Xbox and Surface lines their Enterprise transition will be complete.
shinners 9y ago
Another gaming fad gone by the wayside. Thats too bad. I thought this had potential to be further developed upon.
ripkinect 9y ago
What a shame! If anybody in the Bay Area needs a Kinect for their projects, I have some extra Kinect 360 and Kinect 4 Windows units available..
middle1 9y ago
Giving vote +1. It was time to switch already.

670 points by tlarkworthy 9y ago

When I had an apartment I didn't buy one because I had no room. Now I have a house the xbox one S needed special pricey cables, and there were no games. So I never bought one. I really like the idea of the Kinect but I couldn't use it when it was big.

sotojuan 9y ago

Reliance on Kinect and always online killed the Xbox One. Sure, they backpedaled but it was too late. They really messed up.

endorphone 9y ago
Positioning at introduction is what hobbled the Xbox One -- we mostly forget it now, but while the PS4 was introduced as a gaming device -- all about the games and for gamers -- the Xbox One was introduced as a cable pass-thru device with augmented TV watching, a smart livingroom, an NFL experience, etc. The gaming seemed almost ancillary, and of course classic television was dying (especially among the target market) so a smart TV guide hardly was compelling. It was just a massive misstep, and was years too late for its focus. They've regrouped but the PS4 has retained the lead from that early head-start.
- ballenf 9y ago
  The misstep for a non-hardcore gamer like me was that they didn't really deliver on the home entertainment hub either. It was a device halfway to nowhere. The extra $1 it would have cost to include a digital broadcast tuner (vs. a $75 add on; down to $50 these days) would have been a big draw to cord cutters. Second, the removal of the windows media tools that the 360 had made it less usable as a streaming device. Felt like design by disjointed committee. I bought it as a media hub (and for the Forza series), but ended up being somewhat abandoned by MS as the focus shifted, understandably, to hardcore gamers.
larrik 9y ago
The Xbox One is hardly dead, though.
- ekianjo 9y ago
  Not dead but a massive failure compared to what the Xbox360 did on the market.
  - deleted 9y ago
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  - partiallypro 9y ago
    If I'm not mistaken the Xbox One and PS4 both sold at faster paces than their predecessors.
    - ekianjo 9y ago
      The Xbox One? I'd be very surprised if it did. The PS4, certainly, because the PS3 was a pretty bad experience for Sony.
      - partiallypro 9y ago
        Yes, and as of current, and the Xbox One X is the fastest selling pre-order in Xbox history. Each generation has sold faster than then next. I think this is largely attributable (in the XB360 -> XB1; PS3 -> PS4) to the fact that there was such a large gap between generations, so there was pent up demand. Don't mistake "faster selling" with more overall sales by the end of the generation. As for the PS3 being a bad experience for Sony, that only applies to the first units. By the end of the generation, Sony was almost parity with Microsoft on units sold. So too has Xbox One started to catch up with PS4 (in the U.S.) Microsoft still sells more software per unit though, if I am not mistaken.
- sotojuan 9y ago
  Xbox line has always lost MS money (even back in the glory days of the 360) and Xbox One has lagged way behind PS4 since it launched. "Dead" was an exaggeration, I admit. But it has mediocre if not poor sales.
cwyers 9y ago
There's nothing dead about the Xbox One. Yes, the PS4 outsells it. But most games releases are on both systems, and Microsoft comes through with some solid exclusives ever year. I have an Xbox One and a PS4, and with games that come out on both systems, I play those on the Xbox One because Sony's UI is frustrating to me and it just seems like the software is less polished.
- sotojuan 9y ago
  Meh, don't want to get into a console war argument, sorry. I'll just say this: Xbox One is doing poorly compared to PS4 and its exclusives are becoming nothing special. This is especially true this year when many high profile console games are either Sony exclusive or Japanese so they are not on Xbox One. If Microsoft had launched Xbox One in its current state, it would be neck to neck with PS4. Unfortunately they spent its first year pushing for Kinect, an "entertainment center", and always-online requirements.
- Retric 9y ago
  XBox is missing several exclusives like Uncharted 4, Horizon: Zero Dawn, and Persona 5 so there are plenty of games on just one system. IMO, if you have both then it might not seem like a big deal but PS4 seems to have better exclusives and it's consistently selling 2x as much. It's also at 1/3 as many sales as the Xbox 360 so 'dead' may be over rated but it's not in a great place.
  - cwyers 9y ago
    I have bought and played all of those games, and they're good games. 2017 has been a better year for PS4 exclusives than Xbox One, although maybe I just feel that way because I like the Forza Horizon games more than the Forza Motorsport games and I suck at Cuphead. There's still plenty of Xbox One exclusives that I'm happy I've played.
    - zabuni 9y ago
      It doesn't help that Microsoft cancelled a large amount of their second party titles like Scalebound.
Ralfp 9y ago
Their advertisement summing to "look at all those awesome extra features that you'll never use because they are US-only!" while at same time Sony advertised with "for the players" focus and solid, LOCALISED exclusives didn't do them any favors outside of US either.
nikolay 9y ago
Xbox One never relied on Kinect.
- sp332 9y ago
  MS did threaten to require the Kinect to be plugged in or the console wouldn't boot. They reversed that decision before launch though. http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/163796-xbox-one-no-longer-requires-kinect-but-itll-still-come-in-the-box-and-youll-still-pay-500 http://www.extremetech.com/gaming/163796-xbox-one-no-longer-...

mattmattmatt 9y ago

Was really hoping to see more non-xbox kinect uses over the years. More art installations, more retail, more whatever. Sad to see it go.

th0ma5 9y ago
The original version worked well on Linux. They then had the skeleton detector and such in a proprietary library. I think there are ways to use the newer versions, but they messed with it all enough to make it rather cumbersome.
- lostgame 9y ago
  This [skeleton data being proprietary] is one of the nails in the coffin for sure. I get that MS would like to keep developers into it's little Windows / XBOX box, but forcing me to keep a Windows installation for the sole purpose of using your hardware is a great way to get developers looking for an alternative.
Qworg 9y ago
You'll find that Kinects are powering far more exhibits and retail art projects than you'd know.
- blt 9y ago
  Not to mention a big chunk of robotics research since the Kinect was released.
- mattmattmatt 9y ago
  Totally agree and recognize that. But a bummer to see it disappear into the background (and thus get discontinued as a result).
nitrogen 9y ago
I ran a startup selling controllers to make this easier, but never got much traction and eventually went back to the full-time employment world. One problem is that games are a pretty weak application of the technology, but you need gaming-scale numbers of units to have reasonable costs.

rbanffy 9y ago

I remember the Milo demo. The mix of overpromise and under-delivery is astonishingly consistent.

grabcocque 9y ago
There was a, um, Molyneux effect to consider there too.
- rbanffy 9y ago
  And how about the Longhorn concept from 2003? It took years for the rest of the market to catch up to that and Windows 10 is still not quite up there.
- reificator 9y ago
  I'm glad I didn't know who Molyneux was when I first played Fable, because I had a great time.
tnolet 9y ago
Molyneux gave a pretty interesting and insightful interview on the whole Kinect/Milo debacle http://www.ign.com/articles/2017/04/11/peter-molyneux-kinect-was-a-disaster-trainwreck-a-ign-unfiltered http://www.ign.com/articles/2017/04/11/peter-molyneux-kinect...

cwyers 9y ago

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.

chrisfosterelli 9y ago
I received one as a gift, and while I _really_ love the voice controls I don't think I've ever actually used any of the other features on the device.
- notyourwork 9y ago
  Same - I use it to talk with friends in a party while playing games together. Much better than headset in certain situations.
zitterbewegung 9y ago
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.
chaostheory 9y ago
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.
- 9y ago

larrik 9y ago

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. But it could have been so much better.

WorldMaker 9y ago
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.
- dawnerd 9y ago
  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).
  - flanbiscuit 9y ago
    this? https://youtu.be/uUE_DaM8ymk?t=19s https://youtu.be/uUE_DaM8ymk?t=19s

eaguyhn 9y ago

This was pretty cool - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qhXQ_1CQjg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qhXQ_1CQjg

shravj 9y ago

I knew this was coming for the past few months as the supply was dwindling and resellers were selling them for $45 (half of MSRP). Pretty disappointing since I enjoyed working with these for a project. Have to find an alternative now going forward.

JoeDaDude 9y ago

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.

stephengillie 9y ago
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.
- simplyinfinity 9y ago
  why use the kinect when you can use leapmotion for ~100$ IIRC ( only for hand gesture recognition, that is )
guardian5x 9y ago
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.
lostgame 9y ago
>> 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.

wintorez 9y ago

Looks like Microsoft is on a killing spree these days.

Qworg 9y ago

I'm sad to see this day arrive, even though the community knew the writing was on the wall. As the first truly affordable, mass market depth sensor, it was a shame it couldn't get a second life as a standalone product. It also looks like I'm not going to sell any more books. ;)

dang 9y ago

Url changed from https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/25/16542870/microsoft-kinect-dead-stop-manufacturing https://www.theverge.com/2017/10/25/16542870/microsoft-kinec..., which points to this.

binthere 9y ago

It is still very useful for an affordable mocap solution. I recommend buying one now if you ever want to do it.

mtgx 9y ago

Is there a "Microsoft product graveyard" website we can check out, too?

lowbloodsugar 9y ago

> "Why press a button to duck, when you can just duck?" Why sit on your arse and turn a steering wheel when you can just run forty miles to work? When someone says "Why do X when you can just do Y?" its usually because "just doing Y" is simpler or easier. Turns out that ducking is neither simpler, nor easier.

ksk 9y ago
But it is simpler and easier. You don't have to learn the controls, and actions you know and are familiar with translate exactly into game-space. That sort of game interface can be fun for a certain segment/genre. People still enjoy playing on the Wii. I would concede that its not mainstream, but who knows, maybe we just need to make the right game.

wolco 9y ago

Perhaps they were early. I'm still using my wii daily.

eric_h 9y ago
Really? The original Wii? What do you play?
- gcbw2 9y ago
  last time i powered it on was a few months ago when i found out there was a Sam&Max point'n click game for it!
- wolco 9y ago
  Excite bots and trackmania are great racing games. Also the wii fitness and related sport games. Original broke but I got a red one to replace it.

feelin_googley 9y ago

Most interesting bit of Kinect history, IMO, omitted by the article: https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2373107,00.asp https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2373107,00.asp

wildpeaks 9y ago
Especially as it was a sharp contrast to the history of the Wiimote, where Nintendo had had the opposite reaction and tried to lock DIY makers out once they realized people were using it for unintended purposes. I'm glad Microsoft was smarter about this, it enabled a lot of otherwise costly to develop ideas to emerge at the time and the gaming use of the Kinect is almost anecdotal in retrospect.

robotresearcher 9y ago

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. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/video/body-part-recognition-and-the-development-of-kinect/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/video/body-part-rec...

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
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.
- peterlk 9y ago
  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.
  - cryptoz 9y ago
    Similar deal as Sony removing PS3 features after launch: people found a product they loved, for reasons not envisioned by Sony, who was then hell-bent on shutting it down. Even though it seems like Sony's interest to foster a community of high-tech nerds interested in AI and parallel processing, and even though it seems like it's Microsoft's interest in fostering a community of robotics and computer vision nerds, it turns out the Giant Corporations need lock-down control on products and have no long-term vision for supporting ecosystems or communities.
    - 9y ago

busterarm 9y ago

I wish the USB adapter weren't also $40. I've wanted one for a while for computer vision projects and $40-50 is a fantastic price. Instead I'm looking at maybe getting a 360 Kinect (Certified Refurbished) at $40 and $10 for the usb adapter.

macspoofing 9y ago

Big disappointment. In an age of Echo, and Google Home, I can't understand how Microsoft couldn't make Kinect work. Also, whatever you may think of Kinect, at least they tried something different. The new XboxOne X is just a spec bump. No attempt at innovating any other aspect of the console.

lostgame 9y ago

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. Hopefully the structure sensor [ https://store.structure.io/store 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. :(

philnelson 9y ago
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.
- Qworg 9y ago
  How's the skeletonization these days? Still using NiTE?

nikolay 9y ago

Really? You kill a product right after Apple released something similar on iPhone and glories it?

grzm 9y ago
What Apple product/tech are you thinking of? The two off the top of my head are FaceID and ARKit, and both seem quite a stretch to me. I feel like I’m missing something obvious.
- wmkn 9y ago
  Years ago Apple bought the company, PrimeSense, that developed the technology for the first generation Kinect (the one based on IR structured light). From the description Apple gave of FaceID during the keynote I'm pretty certain that FaceID is pretty much Kinect in an iPhone. Of course the application of it is totally different.
  - grzm 9y ago
    I can see that part, which is why I mentioned FaceID. I just have a hard time seeing it as comparable with respect to the range of the Kinect both in distance and application, as you point out. That’s what motivated my original comment. Are you aware of anything to the contrary? Definitely interested in learning more if so, given the Kinect is going away. I can also see Apple potentially doing more with this in the future, though they’re not there yet. It seems more like Microsoft hasn’t been interested in promoting the Kinect (it’s been out for years) or applying the tech elsewhere, and they’re just shutting it down, the timing being coincidental.
- Vekz 9y ago
  The iPhoneX has essentially a mini Kinect sensor set built into the infamous "black notch" at the top which powers FaceID
  - thefalcon 9y ago
    Emphasis on the mini: that applies to the kind of range it gets too thanks to limited power levels.

Dowwie 9y ago

Hey Microsoft. Why not open source the whole enchilada?

owebmaster 9y ago
Because probably it would take a long time investment to make the code publishable.
echan00 9y ago
Stopping manufacturing doesn't mean they don't value the IP. They spent a whole lot of money on this technology!
- tinus_hn 9y ago
  Better let it safely collect dust in a very dark cupboard!
  - sp332 9y ago
    The (updated) article points out that they're still using this stuff in Hololens, Windows Hello, and other gesture-control stuff. I think some of it has made it to the various VR headsets that are coming out for Windows this month.
    - WorldMaker 9y ago
      Also, stopping manufacturing doesn't mean they couldn't restart manufacturing if a demand or an application showed up. The updated article also mentions that the secondary markets are flooded with Kinect v2s for half retail price ($45), which is a pretty good reason to stop manufacturing if the demand isn't there. It also doesn't preclude Microsoft building a Kinect v3 in the future. (It doesn't even preclude Microsoft building a Kinect v3 in secret in the present.)

Bjorkbat 9y ago

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.

microcolonel 9y ago
> ridiculously cheap cost I think that's the problem, I figure it was meant to increase XBox game licensing money, not turn a direct profit.
- Benjammer 9y ago
  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.
  - Tyr42 9y ago
    Wii, and in general Nintendo consoles are not sold at a loss.
  - dcole2929 9y ago

CrankyBear 9y ago

They were still building those things!?

enuamah 9y ago

Well they have VR now so it makes sense.

cattleprodigy 9y ago

My favorite Kinect art installation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD7gk2kHP3g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD7gk2kHP3g

skeletonjelly 9y ago
We were going to do this for a big new hospital in Melbourne but the guy running the project was a jerk and didn't go with us. It's a great idea for kids hospitals!

coverband 9y ago

IMHO, Kinect is still the best when it comes to sports, exercise, and dance simulation games.

_jdams 9y ago

Sad about the Kinect, but don't interpret this as Microsoft/Xbox failing. They are actually doing a fantastic job with the Xbox brand. The X (scorpio) is launching soon, and they are releasing a bunch of older titles into their ever-expanding backwards compatibility library. In addition, developers are pushing out graphics/performance update patches for the popular titles on the X, and recently overhauled the Xbox UI - it is extremely snappy now and customizable.

dalfonso 9y ago

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.

tchock23 9y ago
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...
- make3 9y ago
  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
  - agar 9y ago
    Have you actually played VR games recently? The most popular games are flight simulators and first person shooters where people walk around (Elite Dangerous, Eve: Valkyrie, FSX, Onward, Pavlov, From Other Suns). The best games released, Lone Echo and Echo Arena, take place in zero-gravity environments with highly non-constant speed and no teleportation. Any game that gets released without joystick/trackpad locomotion will get a flood of angry message board postings. Nausea is certainly a concern, but huge strides have been made in addressing it for the vast majority of players.

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jlebrech 9y ago

they should make a kinect for pc/mac

partiallypro 9y ago
You can use the Kinect on PC.
- jlebrech 9y ago
  it should be better marketed for PC, for example in the vein of google home or amazon echo. you could have a little machine that motivates you to do a workout for example, that can also connect to a pc for more advanced apps.

Thetawaves 9y ago

Is there anything else that fills the voice recognition "xbox watch netflix" "xbox volume up" space? Going back to a physical remote feels like I just took a step back in time.

superbaconman 9y ago
You can use the headset with Cortana for some things, though I'm not sure what all it can do.
- gxh8N 9y ago
  Everything that you could do with Kinect + most Cortana features.
gxh8N 9y ago
The headset ... Sorry. I'm suspecting/hope that someone will integrate Alexa/google home/HK Invoke with XBox. Should be soooo straightforward. I'd do it myself for a hackathon.

FussyZeus 9y ago

I'm somewhat confused, are they talking about just the 360 Kinect or the current ones too?

skeletonjelly 9y ago
v1 (round corners) which was for the 360 and v2 (squared edges) for the One

jwilliams 9y ago

Sad to see this - I recently talked to a startup that was using Kinect for at-home physical therapy. By no means a replacement for PT, but really a huge opportunity for people that didn't have regular/sufficient access to therapy. Hopefully something equivalent can cut through.

cmsonger 9y ago

I wonder what the "followon product" discussions were like and what they said "no" to as a next generation. I mean this seems like an idea whose time will come. What could they have built if they were targeting a product to release before Christmas?

poyu 9y ago

This is quite sad, seeing so many amazing hacked together project that uses the Kinect. I bought a fairly new one at thrift shop for only $15 dollar (!!) a few weeks back.

mcemilg 9y ago

There are lots of university projects developing with this device. This is very sad decision for them. I hope it will back soon.

prophesi 9y ago

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. [1] https://github.com/jawj/websocket-kinect https://github.com/jawj/websocket-kinect [2] https://l2d.co/ https://l2d.co/

derptron 9y ago
I'd say it's a bit too heavy in general.

Nanite 9y ago

Matterport's camera system, a low cost alternative for laser based systems , for 3d mapping interiors, was originally based on a kinect hack back in 2010. Not sure where they are getting their current sensors, but they're doing quite well, the underlying technology is definitly not dead. https://matterport.com/pro2-3d-camera/ https://matterport.com/pro2-3d-camera/

phdsolutions 9y ago

We built a commercially viable product with the 2nd generation Kinect that calculates cubic dimensions of packages for the Transportation/Logistics industry. As others have already stated, the sensor capabilities at the price point offered are unbeatable. For context: our device is capable of measuring the dimensions to a 5mm accuracy on cuboidal (box-shaped) objects sized between 60mm and 1200mm (approx 2.4" to 48") The device has passed certification by some pretty rigid government bodies in North America that spent a significant amount of time evaluating it to ensure it measures correctly ALL the time. Of course we always knew this day would come eventually, but it kinda sucks that it had to be today though. Time to buy up those surplus refurbs I suppose..

skizm 9y ago

I assume they were selling this under cost in order to sell more games (software) which is where they make most of their money. Selling it as a standalone piece of tech would probably require a price hike ultimately making it less appealing and at the end of they day they probably projected they wouldn't move enough units to make it worth it.

housel 9y ago

Orbbec Astra (https://orbbec3d.com/product-astra/ https://orbbec3d.com/product-astra/) is still a viable option for applications (such as robotics) that need an RGBD camera. The body-tracking SDK is still in beta at the moment.

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Nicholas7900 9y ago

billphipps 9y ago

waste of time

JaRail 9y ago

I think this speaks to a change in direction to VR/AR systems. It seems pretty clear that long-term tracking solutions will include face/body tracking. Oculus hopes their camera-based tracking can be extended to track full bodies and arbitrary objects. Headsets are getting eye-tracking for foveated rendering. I'll miss the kinect but it doesn't play nice with newer tracking systems. They confuse each other. That makes it difficult to use in combination with a Vive. I'm guessing they aren't very reliable multi-camera systems either. Unlike the Vive, they don't have a timing mechanism to avoid confusing each other.

amigoingtodie 9y ago

I just bought and returned two used Kinects from gamestop. They were $28 each. Tried to use the native Windows 10 3-d scanning program with both and hotrible results. It was nothing like the MS demo footage. The color image would not map properly to the point-cloud. The second camera was better, but still 'off'. I wonder how reliable the miniaturized Apple version will be, particularly being knocked around.

rsp1984 9y ago

What many don't know: The exact chips and technology behind the Kinect v1 (as developed by PrimeSense) are still in use today in many products: We (that is -- shameless plug -- my company DotProduct) combine a Primesense Carmine sensor (basically a smaller version of the Kinect) with an Android tablet and our software to create a self-contained portable 3D scanner (www.dotproduct3d.com). Occipital has created their own version of the sensor which they call the "Structure" sensor, but it's still based on Kinect/PrimeSense tech (www.structure.io). Matterport (a YC company) is using the tech in a tripod based scanner to create 3D interior walkthroughs (www.matterport.com). The reason these sensors are still in use is largely that PrimeSense (at the time they released the Kinect) was technologically about 7 years ahead of every other 3D camera manufacturer in the market. Only very recently we're starting to see sensors that rival the Kinect/Carmine in terms of overall quality.

nh2 9y ago
> Only very recently we're starting to see sensors that rival the Kinect/Carmine in terms of overall quality. Can you make an example of such alternatives? Are they barebones sensors, or full hardware a consumer can buy?
- gxh8N 9y ago
  Doesn't answer your question directly, but I would assume that an example is the new iPhone X face unlock sensor, since PrimeSense was acquired by Apple.

donatj 9y ago

I still love my Kinect. It came out at the end of the 360's lifetime, so I waited for the Xbox One to get one which was sadly a mistake. Games supporting Kinect on Xbox One are limited to say the least. I am still however enamored with the automatic login. It sees me all the way across the room and logs me in. It's wonderful. It used to work even better with the first gen controllers which had identifier IR lights in them. My friend and I could swap controllers and continue to play the same side of the screen. It was truly magical. The gen 2 "S" controllers however eliminated the IR lights.

gerdesj 9y ago

"Launched in 2010 with a $500 million marketing campaign" I am very, very, far from being a MS apologist but I think that dropping Kinect is a really stupid idea, strategically. MS have dropped quite a few balls recently and this is another one. No doubt in the boardroom this will be an obvious slash to balance the books but it is a bloody stupid idea when you look a bit wider. This thing was/is a bit of a game changer - not really new, per se, but very useful in quite a few areas. Quietly, many groups in many areas of research and development have used this thing to do things that border on sci fi. I hope Kinect is dropped somewhere else - it is just good enough to work well.

burnte 9y ago
Kinect is the same thing today that touch screens were in the 80s; touted as a revolution that will take over everywhere, then people realize sitting there waving your arms for yours is not enjoyable, and then it finds a niche and stabilizes at a much smaller size than everyone expected.

wiseleo 9y ago

This is sad news. I love playing dance games with Kinect. The "Dance Central" series is brutally accurate in its judging. I remember seeing a demo of Project Natal, which was Kinect's codename. It deeply impressed me because it looked like technology from the future. In fact, I bought an Xbox 360 instead of Xbox One because I wanted to play those specific games and they like other original Kinect titles are only supported on the 360 Platform.

burntrelish1273 9y ago

Ah, the Kinect... platform for the first Matterport revision. (Matt B. is so next-level ridiculously creative, Adam Savage would tip his fedora.) Matterport is a really neat mesh/texture capture and stitching platform that I only saw rough demos run based on multiple fixed CCTVs to do forensic 3D scene reconstruction from UC Davis researchers some years before. Also, a first-hand story for this category: Once upon a time, next door to my grandparents house in SJ/Los Gatos region, there lived a renter... not any renter, but a corporate/PhD/engineer whom quit his job to start a startup. After some casual conversation, he mentioned he was working on then something stealth-mode involving machine vision and 3D screen interfacing (think Kinect meets Wii controllers). Many Maybachs, Merc S-series and Aston Martins came by to due-diligence and meet said entrepreneur's startup, team and tech at this rental 3-BD with a dedicated meeting room near Hwy 85. The odd thing was, I never heard what happened to him and has baby. That is until I ran into someone whom did some work for him several years later. (The Valley is a very small place; heck, yours truly toured Woz'es and coworker's homes under construction when I was like 7, but I was more interested in the steep road (Harwood IIRC) out front for high-speed skateboarding/bicycling.) Anyhow, it turns out, the night before the demo, the CEO made a source code change or something that broke the build. And, there weren't backups because they weren't using a (D)VCS. (Ouch.) I think it was acquired for an "undisclosed sum" for IP and wound down IIRC. What sucks is having to go back to work, kind of a tech "bar closing walk-of-shame," but there's always next time.

bitmapbrother 9y ago

I've lost track on how many consumer products Microsoft has abandoned over the years. Once they kill their Xbox and Surface lines their Enterprise transition will be complete.

shinners 9y ago

Another gaming fad gone by the wayside. Thats too bad. I thought this had potential to be further developed upon.

ripkinect 9y ago

What a shame! If anybody in the Bay Area needs a Kinect for their projects, I have some extra Kinect 360 and Kinect 4 Windows units available..

middle1 9y ago

Giving vote +1. It was time to switch already.