8 ms·

The Future of Kinect

96 points by ghosh 12y ago

ghshephard 12y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that wasn't so much a "Future of Kinect" as it was some background on all the effort it takes to make the Kinect technology work, right?
- pertinhower 12y ago
  It seemed to me to say that the Future of Kinect is not particularly as an essential aspect a major gaming platform. "Museums, hotels, and corporate offices" seemed to figure large in its increasingly tiny future. The article seems like a bit of a swan song—maybe a consolation prize to honor all the people who worked on an ingenious but basically rejected product?
- drzaiusapelord 12y ago
  This is what I'm seeing as well. Not sure what's going on with the Kinect now that its no longer bundled with the Xbox. I think that decoupling is sane move. The Kinect seems to be magical at all things except gaming and a $100 premium for it doesn't make sense when your competitor is outselling you. Outside of the dance games, it really never found its calling and you can only sell so many dance games. Damage control regarding the Kinect is everywhere now, including this article. I just saw that the game Destiny is jettisoning Kinect support and because of that, is now playable at a higher resolution. MS is scrambling to make the "Kinect reserve" configurable instead of static. I believe the June update for the Xbox has this functionality, but how many devs will just go, "Who cares" and set it zero just like Bungie did with Destiny? Most I assume, especially if their games play at 720p on Xbox w/ Kinect but 1080p on PS4. I really think the Kinect is more or less dead and have blogged about it in the past: http://nothingjustworks.com/microsoft-just-gave-up-on-the-kinect/ http://nothingjustworks.com/microsoft-just-gave-up-on-the-ki... FWIW, I have the new Xbox with the Kinect and even as a Kinect fan I'm underwhelmed. I also had to disable the voice turn on feature because when its on, the xbox doesn't fully turn off, so a little fan runs 24/7 on the xbox power supply and it makes just enough noise to be annoying when watching TV and movies. In the age of silent tablets and passively cooled devices, a non-stop hum from a fan on a media center device is inexcusable. Couldn't they passively cooled the power supply?
  - VLM 12y ago
    "Outside of the dance games, it really never found its calling" I'm sad to write that "just dance kids edition" equals tears during menu navigation. Works fine during gameplay, its just the wrong UI for anything involving menus or detail work or ... pretty much anything other than dancing. The fundamental insight of the kinect "problem" is its a transparent interface that people hate about 10% of the time. That sounds great, people love it 90% of the time, right? No, because its transparent, it disappears 90% of the time and all that remains is the boiling cauldron of hate. As a real world insight into how much people love interfacing with electronics using large motor movements vs pushing buttons on a box, look at how remote controls have completely disappeared from the marketplace and everyone loves changing channels by getting up off the couch and walking around, and its such a great hit of exercise too. Oh wait the marketplace has gone the opposite direction. Yeah that too. The other part I don't like is Microsoft pays an entire army of astroturfers who have poorly written scripts. Astroturfers should at least show some respect, by not having poorly written scripts. If your astroturfing script looks like a parody of customer support videos or a parody of the wikipedia list of logical fallacies, you're just doin it wrong. Even fanboi trolls are better than bad astroturf scripts.
    - nasmorn 12y ago
      That is because fanbois are just customers of products you don't like. Who also cannot be bothered to shut up about said products.
unphasable 12y ago
Too bad this future will be an afterthought now that the Kinect is not included with every system. Most devs will certainly prefer the 8% increase in processing power by disabling kinect in their game as opposed to adding a kinect feature that only some users might be able to enjoy. The future of kinect is now going to be carried out on PC, can't wait to see what people cook up with the v2. Kinect + Leap Motion + Oculus + Control VR gloves. This set up could deliver some serious immersion, at least in the aspect of accurately bringing the user's hands into a virtual space.
- chaostheory 12y ago
  I thought Kinect had about 30% of an Xbox One's processing power reserved for it?
  - SahAssar 12y ago
    I think that's for the whole OS and UI that runs constantly in the background or on the side of the screen. The kinect only takes up part of that.
    - higherpurpose 12y ago
      The OS takes 30 percent of the processing power with a game running? That's crazy if true. It would show how silly the whole idea of "one OS everywhere" really is. It would be much better to have a more stripped down OS that just does the basics and gets you inside a game, and then gets out of the way, instead. But this shows once again the conflictual nature of Microsoft's two strategies with the Xbox One. It's like the gaming part is more of an afterthought, and what they really want is for Xbox to become everyone's streaming box - a $400 streaming box. This notion of "one OS everywhere" is what we'll get us a Windows 8 smartwatch with 2GB of RAM and a Celeron processor - because who wouldn't want that?!
      - danieldk 12y ago
        But this shows once again the conflictual nature of Microsoft's two strategies with the Xbox One. It's like the gaming part is more of an afterthought, and what they really want is for Xbox to become everyone's streaming box - a $400 streaming box. For now. But they also have a perfectly capable $179 streaming box that blows e.g. the Apple TV out of the water performance-wise and has a large number of popular game titles. The XBox One is apparently popular enough to sell a couple of million devices (roughly in the same ballpark as most other streaming boxes) and packs enough punch to gently go from $400 to the 360's price point. What I wonder about is what's in it for Microsoft. First of all, the music + movie + some apps market is much larger than the hard core gamer's market. And they make it awfully hard for people to buy into their ecosystem. A $50 streaming box would make that Windows Phone (which cannot stream to Apple TV or Chromecast) much more interesting for a lot of people than having to buy a game console for streaming.
3327 12y ago
Seeing the future requires reading between the lines and imagining. If any of you have developed with the Kinect, (i spent a year on it 2 years ago) it is pretty impressive for a not too expensive piece of hardware. I think MSFT is doing it right by really working on it, as we all are aware they have had their share of flops. Putting out a great product specially like kinect is pretty exciting. Oculus is cool but its FB buyout puts it in a strange place and it was years out anyway from general adoption. The kinect is much simpler and cheaper and has already been out on the market which, gives it some validation. Plus, I am not sure how many people will go through the trouble of putting on goggles in wide range adoption. That being said I think simpler devices like the kinect have more mass market appeal, and thus the adoption of devices like kinect will ultimately be instrumental in the success of more complex interfaces like Oculus, etc...
- rtfeldman 12y ago
  Kinect has the bad kind of validation though: people are so disinterested in paying for it that Microsoft has unbundled it from the XBox in an effort to stop it from dragging down sales. http://www.spartanpr.com/xbox-one-kinect-u-turn-the-pr-impact/ http://www.spartanpr.com/xbox-one-kinect-u-turn-the-pr-impac...
  - gtirloni 12y ago
    "People" here refers more to the hardcore gamers than anything else. Regular folks seem to love playing games designed for it.
    - beaumartinez 12y ago
      Perhaps, but are "regular folks" that inclined to buy an Xbox One just to play a few Kinect games? Sales figures suggest not.
      - gtirloni 12y ago
        What sales figures? Xbox One without Kinect started to be sold today. I think it's a little early to tell if Kinect was the thing holding all those sales. If you're comparing sales figures from XboxOne (w/ Kinect) versus PS4 (w/o Move), I think that adds too many variables to be object right now. Let's see how this thing goes. Good thing is there is more option now. If you don't care about Kinect, you're not forced to buy it anymore. It doesn't change the fact it's an incredible piece of technology. http://news.xbox.com/2014/05/xbox-delivering-more-choices http://news.xbox.com/2014/05/xbox-delivering-more-choices First, beginning on June 9th, in all markets where Xbox One is sold, we will offer Xbox One starting at $399. This is a new console option that does not include Kinect.
iandanforth 12y ago
To me Kinect is just a sensor, and all I want from it is data. I want it to work on OSX or Ubuntu as easily as Windows or XBOX. That would be the only future I'm interested in.
- bignaj 12y ago
  Your point about OS interoperability makes sense but you should really, really rethink the "to me kinect is just a sensor, and all I want from it is data" part. If you've ever used a Kinect or similar device half the glory of it is the software processing, voice recognition and face recognition etc. Sure you could probably get just the data if you wanted, but dumbing down the device is certainly not the future. You could have had your version of "the future" ~10 years ago -- just go buy a cheap camcorder. Perhaps you're saying you'd like to write your own audio/video/recognition/processing algorithms for the Kinect?
  - colincsl 12y ago
    As a robotics/computer vision researcher I disagree with you. The first Kinect was a godsend for robotics - previously it cost thousands of dollars for similar types of sensors. Typically we just want the raw data so that we can do whatever processing we want. It was nice because it worked on Mac/Linux/Windows without too much hassle. The new Kinect on the other hand is of little use to me right now. It's locked down on Windows - and as far as I know you need the special dev kit version for it to even work. Also, a "cheap camcorder" is nothing compared to this. The Kinect is a 3D sensor. You would need 2 "cheap camcorders," stereo vision algorithms/hardware to process it in real-time, and even then the quality typically wouldn't be as good as the Kinect. Tangentially, it's also disheartening (at least for the time being) that Apple recently bought Primesense - the maker of the original Kinect. Primesense was selling a better 3D sensor for developers/researchers. Apple shut it down as soon as they bought them.
    - Qworg 12y ago
      You're in luck - we're working on it. We've had alpha level success in extracting depth data thus far. https://github.com/OpenKinect/libfreenect2 https://github.com/OpenKinect/libfreenect2 We're always looking for more contributors!
_Adam 12y ago
The Kinect has enormous potential for use in virtual reality systems. It can significantly increase the feeling of immersion because you see in VR how your own body is moving in the real world. I don't know if Microsoft is exploring VR applications of the Kinect, but they haven't really done anything with VR at all. Sony has Morpheus, but Microsoft doesn't have anything. They'll probably just miss out on VR like they missed out on mobile, and then spend billions trying and failing to catch up 4 years from now...
- rasz_pl 12y ago
  Kinect destroys immersion, skeletal tracking has ~200ms delay on Kinect One.
rasz_pl 12y ago
That sweet sweet 500ms of input LAG every time you see both player and the TV. M$ is blowing it with Kinect One again. They are over promising, and not delivering. We bought instant fast paced gameplay bullshit the first time with X360. This is how first Kinect games actually worked: http://www.collegehumor.com/video/6348385/mega-difficult-xbox-kinect-racing-game http://www.collegehumor.com/video/6348385/mega-difficult-xbo... or games that advertised kinect, but used only microphone lol. And here we go again with Microsoft showing fast movements and twitch games while technology is simply not there yet. Slow down, build from the grounds up, slow paced uses first until you can reach 1-2 frames of delay instead of alienating whole user base by delivering laggy shit.
danohuiginn 12y ago
It was only when I opened the link that I realised how much I'd been dreading the experience of reading it. I'd semi-consciously been expecting small-print text surrounded by confusing navbars directing me to enterprisey product areas. Nice to see microsoft have a non-sucky website now.

96 points by ghosh 12y ago

Correct me if I'm wrong, but that wasn't so much a "Future of Kinect" as it was some background on all the effort it takes to make the Kinect technology work, right?

pertinhower 12y ago
It seemed to me to say that the Future of Kinect is not particularly as an essential aspect a major gaming platform. "Museums, hotels, and corporate offices" seemed to figure large in its increasingly tiny future. The article seems like a bit of a swan song—maybe a consolation prize to honor all the people who worked on an ingenious but basically rejected product?
drzaiusapelord 12y ago
This is what I'm seeing as well. Not sure what's going on with the Kinect now that its no longer bundled with the Xbox. I think that decoupling is sane move. The Kinect seems to be magical at all things except gaming and a $100 premium for it doesn't make sense when your competitor is outselling you. Outside of the dance games, it really never found its calling and you can only sell so many dance games. Damage control regarding the Kinect is everywhere now, including this article. I just saw that the game Destiny is jettisoning Kinect support and because of that, is now playable at a higher resolution. MS is scrambling to make the "Kinect reserve" configurable instead of static. I believe the June update for the Xbox has this functionality, but how many devs will just go, "Who cares" and set it zero just like Bungie did with Destiny? Most I assume, especially if their games play at 720p on Xbox w/ Kinect but 1080p on PS4. I really think the Kinect is more or less dead and have blogged about it in the past: http://nothingjustworks.com/microsoft-just-gave-up-on-the-kinect/ http://nothingjustworks.com/microsoft-just-gave-up-on-the-ki... FWIW, I have the new Xbox with the Kinect and even as a Kinect fan I'm underwhelmed. I also had to disable the voice turn on feature because when its on, the xbox doesn't fully turn off, so a little fan runs 24/7 on the xbox power supply and it makes just enough noise to be annoying when watching TV and movies. In the age of silent tablets and passively cooled devices, a non-stop hum from a fan on a media center device is inexcusable. Couldn't they passively cooled the power supply?
- VLM 12y ago
  "Outside of the dance games, it really never found its calling" I'm sad to write that "just dance kids edition" equals tears during menu navigation. Works fine during gameplay, its just the wrong UI for anything involving menus or detail work or ... pretty much anything other than dancing. The fundamental insight of the kinect "problem" is its a transparent interface that people hate about 10% of the time. That sounds great, people love it 90% of the time, right? No, because its transparent, it disappears 90% of the time and all that remains is the boiling cauldron of hate. As a real world insight into how much people love interfacing with electronics using large motor movements vs pushing buttons on a box, look at how remote controls have completely disappeared from the marketplace and everyone loves changing channels by getting up off the couch and walking around, and its such a great hit of exercise too. Oh wait the marketplace has gone the opposite direction. Yeah that too. The other part I don't like is Microsoft pays an entire army of astroturfers who have poorly written scripts. Astroturfers should at least show some respect, by not having poorly written scripts. If your astroturfing script looks like a parody of customer support videos or a parody of the wikipedia list of logical fallacies, you're just doin it wrong. Even fanboi trolls are better than bad astroturf scripts.
  - nasmorn 12y ago
    That is because fanbois are just customers of products you don't like. Who also cannot be bothered to shut up about said products.

unphasable 12y ago

Too bad this future will be an afterthought now that the Kinect is not included with every system. Most devs will certainly prefer the 8% increase in processing power by disabling kinect in their game as opposed to adding a kinect feature that only some users might be able to enjoy. The future of kinect is now going to be carried out on PC, can't wait to see what people cook up with the v2. Kinect + Leap Motion + Oculus + Control VR gloves. This set up could deliver some serious immersion, at least in the aspect of accurately bringing the user's hands into a virtual space.

chaostheory 12y ago
I thought Kinect had about 30% of an Xbox One's processing power reserved for it?
- SahAssar 12y ago
  I think that's for the whole OS and UI that runs constantly in the background or on the side of the screen. The kinect only takes up part of that.
  - higherpurpose 12y ago
    The OS takes 30 percent of the processing power with a game running? That's crazy if true. It would show how silly the whole idea of "one OS everywhere" really is. It would be much better to have a more stripped down OS that just does the basics and gets you inside a game, and then gets out of the way, instead. But this shows once again the conflictual nature of Microsoft's two strategies with the Xbox One. It's like the gaming part is more of an afterthought, and what they really want is for Xbox to become everyone's streaming box - a $400 streaming box. This notion of "one OS everywhere" is what we'll get us a Windows 8 smartwatch with 2GB of RAM and a Celeron processor - because who wouldn't want that?!
    - danieldk 12y ago
      But this shows once again the conflictual nature of Microsoft's two strategies with the Xbox One. It's like the gaming part is more of an afterthought, and what they really want is for Xbox to become everyone's streaming box - a $400 streaming box. For now. But they also have a perfectly capable $179 streaming box that blows e.g. the Apple TV out of the water performance-wise and has a large number of popular game titles. The XBox One is apparently popular enough to sell a couple of million devices (roughly in the same ballpark as most other streaming boxes) and packs enough punch to gently go from $400 to the 360's price point. What I wonder about is what's in it for Microsoft. First of all, the music + movie + some apps market is much larger than the hard core gamer's market. And they make it awfully hard for people to buy into their ecosystem. A $50 streaming box would make that Windows Phone (which cannot stream to Apple TV or Chromecast) much more interesting for a lot of people than having to buy a game console for streaming.

3327 12y ago

Seeing the future requires reading between the lines and imagining. If any of you have developed with the Kinect, (i spent a year on it 2 years ago) it is pretty impressive for a not too expensive piece of hardware. I think MSFT is doing it right by really working on it, as we all are aware they have had their share of flops. Putting out a great product specially like kinect is pretty exciting. Oculus is cool but its FB buyout puts it in a strange place and it was years out anyway from general adoption. The kinect is much simpler and cheaper and has already been out on the market which, gives it some validation. Plus, I am not sure how many people will go through the trouble of putting on goggles in wide range adoption. That being said I think simpler devices like the kinect have more mass market appeal, and thus the adoption of devices like kinect will ultimately be instrumental in the success of more complex interfaces like Oculus, etc...

rtfeldman 12y ago
Kinect has the bad kind of validation though: people are so disinterested in paying for it that Microsoft has unbundled it from the XBox in an effort to stop it from dragging down sales. http://www.spartanpr.com/xbox-one-kinect-u-turn-the-pr-impact/ http://www.spartanpr.com/xbox-one-kinect-u-turn-the-pr-impac...
- gtirloni 12y ago
  "People" here refers more to the hardcore gamers than anything else. Regular folks seem to love playing games designed for it.
  - beaumartinez 12y ago
    Perhaps, but are "regular folks" that inclined to buy an Xbox One just to play a few Kinect games? Sales figures suggest not.
    - gtirloni 12y ago
      What sales figures? Xbox One without Kinect started to be sold today. I think it's a little early to tell if Kinect was the thing holding all those sales. If you're comparing sales figures from XboxOne (w/ Kinect) versus PS4 (w/o Move), I think that adds too many variables to be object right now. Let's see how this thing goes. Good thing is there is more option now. If you don't care about Kinect, you're not forced to buy it anymore. It doesn't change the fact it's an incredible piece of technology. http://news.xbox.com/2014/05/xbox-delivering-more-choices http://news.xbox.com/2014/05/xbox-delivering-more-choices First, beginning on June 9th, in all markets where Xbox One is sold, we will offer Xbox One starting at $399. This is a new console option that does not include Kinect.

iandanforth 12y ago

To me Kinect is just a sensor, and all I want from it is data. I want it to work on OSX or Ubuntu as easily as Windows or XBOX. That would be the only future I'm interested in.

bignaj 12y ago
Your point about OS interoperability makes sense but you should really, really rethink the "to me kinect is just a sensor, and all I want from it is data" part. If you've ever used a Kinect or similar device half the glory of it is the software processing, voice recognition and face recognition etc. Sure you could probably get just the data if you wanted, but dumbing down the device is certainly not the future. You could have had your version of "the future" ~10 years ago -- just go buy a cheap camcorder. Perhaps you're saying you'd like to write your own audio/video/recognition/processing algorithms for the Kinect?
- colincsl 12y ago
  As a robotics/computer vision researcher I disagree with you. The first Kinect was a godsend for robotics - previously it cost thousands of dollars for similar types of sensors. Typically we just want the raw data so that we can do whatever processing we want. It was nice because it worked on Mac/Linux/Windows without too much hassle. The new Kinect on the other hand is of little use to me right now. It's locked down on Windows - and as far as I know you need the special dev kit version for it to even work. Also, a "cheap camcorder" is nothing compared to this. The Kinect is a 3D sensor. You would need 2 "cheap camcorders," stereo vision algorithms/hardware to process it in real-time, and even then the quality typically wouldn't be as good as the Kinect. Tangentially, it's also disheartening (at least for the time being) that Apple recently bought Primesense - the maker of the original Kinect. Primesense was selling a better 3D sensor for developers/researchers. Apple shut it down as soon as they bought them.
  - Qworg 12y ago
    You're in luck - we're working on it. We've had alpha level success in extracting depth data thus far. https://github.com/OpenKinect/libfreenect2 https://github.com/OpenKinect/libfreenect2 We're always looking for more contributors!

_Adam 12y ago

The Kinect has enormous potential for use in virtual reality systems. It can significantly increase the feeling of immersion because you see in VR how your own body is moving in the real world. I don't know if Microsoft is exploring VR applications of the Kinect, but they haven't really done anything with VR at all. Sony has Morpheus, but Microsoft doesn't have anything. They'll probably just miss out on VR like they missed out on mobile, and then spend billions trying and failing to catch up 4 years from now...

rasz_pl 12y ago
Kinect destroys immersion, skeletal tracking has ~200ms delay on Kinect One.

rasz_pl 12y ago

That sweet sweet 500ms of input LAG every time you see both player and the TV. M$ is blowing it with Kinect One again. They are over promising, and not delivering. We bought instant fast paced gameplay bullshit the first time with X360. This is how first Kinect games actually worked: http://www.collegehumor.com/video/6348385/mega-difficult-xbox-kinect-racing-game http://www.collegehumor.com/video/6348385/mega-difficult-xbo... or games that advertised kinect, but used only microphone lol. And here we go again with Microsoft showing fast movements and twitch games while technology is simply not there yet. Slow down, build from the grounds up, slow paced uses first until you can reach 1-2 frames of delay instead of alienating whole user base by delivering laggy shit.

danohuiginn 12y ago

It was only when I opened the link that I realised how much I'd been dreading the experience of reading it. I'd semi-consciously been expecting small-print text surrounded by confusing navbars directing me to enterprisey product areas. Nice to see microsoft have a non-sucky website now.