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The Azure Kinect was released as a successor for the research and business applications[1]. I know one roboticist who has used one, but no one aside from that.

The Azure Kinect was released as a successor for the research and business applications[1]. I know one roboticist who has used one, but no one aside from that. Definitely dead as a consumer gaming device, but a product evolving towards a discovered usecase is a surprisingly happy outcome from MS. [1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/services/kinect-dk/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/services/kinect-dk/

Aissen 5y ago
The page says "Call to order", which is quite a bit different from a publicly available product.
CactusOnFire 5y ago
When I saw "Killed by google" I came out of it with a general sentiment about how google can't commit to a specific roadmap. After seeing this site and then the comments here, I am coming out of this with the general sentiment that Microsoft is genuinely thoughtful about addressing end-of-life products.
- abandonliberty 5y ago
  Google is experimental. We're both the product and research subjects, not customers, for their free offerings. Their transition into the paid/enterprise space is very interesting. I'm very excited for them to find a non-advertising revenue stream, as it could help Google to stop being evil. They're still a very amazing company. However, their approach providing free services is a bit subpar. I've ran into so many table-stake bugs that simply don't exist in MSFT offerings (e.g. copy/paste between Google office applications often breaks formatting). Thanks to our mid-size enterprise contract, I can get someone to tell me that not enough people are complaining about it for them to fix it. Meanwhile, from asking my teams at work, everyone struggles with lack of polish across their applications.
johnnyanmac 5y ago
ahh, thank you. I couldn't find any products when simply searching "kinect". Glad they actually did pivot the product. Really nice price too, while being (based on a bit of research) much more powerful than the old Kinect.
WorldMaker 5y ago
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 to being thousands of dollars of lab equipment, it became part of the computing atmosphere around us. That's an incredibly interesting and weird win that a lot of people wouldn't necessarily credit Microsoft for being such a lever, such an instigator of change/innovation, such a bridge between R&D dreams and "background" reality. (ETA: Microsoft still sometimes uses the IntelliMouse brand as a bit of a retro-throwback, but the above analogy does help show how much that brand is very related to the Kinect brand. Almost every mouse today is an "IntelliMouse" under the original brand meaning. The brand did its job so successfully to point where people don't even sometimes remember the brand, other than sometimes retro-hardware fans.)

Aissen 5y ago

The page says "Call to order", which is quite a bit different from a publicly available product.

CactusOnFire 5y ago

When I saw "Killed by google" I came out of it with a general sentiment about how google can't commit to a specific roadmap. After seeing this site and then the comments here, I am coming out of this with the general sentiment that Microsoft is genuinely thoughtful about addressing end-of-life products.

abandonliberty 5y ago
Google is experimental. We're both the product and research subjects, not customers, for their free offerings. Their transition into the paid/enterprise space is very interesting. I'm very excited for them to find a non-advertising revenue stream, as it could help Google to stop being evil. They're still a very amazing company. However, their approach providing free services is a bit subpar. I've ran into so many table-stake bugs that simply don't exist in MSFT offerings (e.g. copy/paste between Google office applications often breaks formatting). Thanks to our mid-size enterprise contract, I can get someone to tell me that not enough people are complaining about it for them to fix it. Meanwhile, from asking my teams at work, everyone struggles with lack of polish across their applications.

johnnyanmac 5y ago

ahh, thank you. I couldn't find any products when simply searching "kinect". Glad they actually did pivot the product. Really nice price too, while being (based on a bit of research) much more powerful than the old Kinect.

WorldMaker 5y ago

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 to being thousands of dollars of lab equipment, it became part of the computing atmosphere around us. That's an incredibly interesting and weird win that a lot of people wouldn't necessarily credit Microsoft for being such a lever, such an instigator of change/innovation, such a bridge between R&D dreams and "background" reality. (ETA: Microsoft still sometimes uses the IntelliMouse brand as a bit of a retro-throwback, but the above analogy does help show how much that brand is very related to the Kinect brand. Almost every mouse today is an "IntelliMouse" under the original brand meaning. The brand did its job so successfully to point where people don't even sometimes remember the brand, other than sometimes retro-hardware fans.)