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Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect

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Re: Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect

#51

Post by WillPostForFood »

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #32
sotojuan wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, it hasn't. Read a recent 10-K.

Microsoft has always lumped the Xbox in with other divisions so you can't tell from the financial reports whether it is or has been profitable. The only indication from Microsoft that it is profitable is this statement from Nadella, which is at least a little ambiguous.

Our gaming business now is more than $9 billion and growing profitably.

Re: Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect

#55

Post by notyourwork »

chrisfosterelli wrote: post #31
cwyers wrote: post #6

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…

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.

Same - I use it to talk with friends in a party while playing games together. Much better than headset in certain situations.

Re: Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect

#56

Post by robotresearcher »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #40
robotresearcher wrote: post #38

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.

There are lots of alternatives today, though they took a while coming. Kinect was great, but we'll live :)

https://www.intel.ca/content/www/ca/en/architecture-and-tech...

Re: Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect

#57

Post by chaostheory »

cwyers wrote: post #6

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…

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.

Re: Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect

#59

Post by philnelson »

lostgame wrote: post #47

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…

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.
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