41–50 of 265 posts
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 pers…
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 Kinec…
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 t…
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 ] 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. :(
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-rec...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 pers…