My former startup Zigfu (YC S11) made the installer for the OpenNI libraries as well as the APIs for Unity3D and a browser plugin to support Javascript Kinect a

My former startup Zigfu (YC S11) made the installer for the OpenNI libraries as well as the APIs for Unity3D and a browser plugin to support Javascript Kinect applications. A significant number of Kinects were never used with an Xbox, but rather were used by Kinect hackers to make other applications. In my opinion the main failure of Kinect was Microsoft not providing a market for the Kinect hackers --- had they embraced that incredibly motivated group, they would have had a number of casual-games making $1-20 apps for Kinect on Xbox. They seemed extraordinarily reticent to open up the Xbox ecosystem to a broad set of developers. PrimeSense was the company that put out a free (libre) skeleton tracking API in the months after the Kinect launch and it took Microsoft quite a while to have an official Kinect for Windows SDK. No one ever properly funded and developed a user-interface library for Kinect to provide high level menu/list components for developers. Of all the games made, only Dance Central had a usable gesture-controlled menu.