They were still building those things!?
Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect
71–80 of 265 posts
Re: Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect
#72Well they have VR now so it makes sense.
Re: Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
What Apple product/tech are you thinking of? The two off the top of my head are FaceID and ARKit, and both seem quite a stretch to me. I feel like I’m missing something obvious.
The iPhoneX has essentially a mini Kinect sensor set built into the infamous "black notch" at the top which powers FaceID
Emphasis on the mini: that applies to the kind of range it gets too thanks to limited power levels.
Re: Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect
#74My favorite Kinect art installation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD7gk2kHP3g
Re: Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect
#75The 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...
Maybe that was MS' problem. People that buy a 1st gen (2010) and still using it. Not upgrading it. Not replacing it. MS can't possibly profit off of it when only 1 kinect per lab is bought.
Re: Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect
#76This is a shame. I mean, yeah, it was a pretty awkward gaming accessory, but outside the context of gaming people were doing some pretty fun things with it. A powerful sensor at a ridiculously cheap cost that you could use to create amazing things, provided of course your imagination wasn't weighed down by the latest dumb tech trend. That last statement is just as true now as it was when the Kinect originally came ou…
> ridiculously cheap cost
I think that's the problem, I figure it was meant to increase XBox game licensing money, not turn a direct profit.
Re: Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect
#77I remember the Milo demo. The mix of overpromise and under-delivery is astonishingly consistent.
Molyneux gave a pretty interesting and insightful interview on the whole Kinect/Milo debacle http://www.ign.com/articles/2017/04/11/peter-molyneux-kinect...
Re: Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect
#78Re: Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
What Apple product/tech are you thinking of? The two off the top of my head are FaceID and ARKit, and both seem quite a stretch to me. I feel like I’m missing something obvious.
Years ago Apple bought the company, PrimeSense, that developed the technology for the first generation Kinect (the one based on IR structured light). From the description Apple gave of FaceID during the keynote I'm pretty certain that FaceID is pretty much Kinect in an iPhone. Of course the application of it is totally different.
I can see that part, which is why I mentioned FaceID. I just have a hard time seeing it as comparable with respect to the range of the Kinect both in distance and application, as you point out. That’s what motivated my original comment.
Are you aware of anything to the contrary? Definitely interested in learning more if so, given the Kinect is going away. I can also see Apple potentially doing more with this in the future, though they’re not there yet.
It seems more like Microsoft hasn’t been interested in promoting the Kinect (it’s been out for years) or applying the tech elsewhere, and they’re just shutting it down, the timing being coincidental.
Re: Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect
#80Most unfortunate. I was hoping to see the technology applied to VR. One of my complaints/observations about VR is that you are a disembodied viewpoint in the VR environment. Something like a Kinect mocap system would add bodily presence in the VR environment.
>> Something like a Kinect mocap system would add bodily presence in the VR environment. I personally spearheaded a couple of projects to make it work with the Vive in this way. Unfortunately, the Kinect's tendency to screw up leg motion, SDK's and API's that read like an old grimoire of Black Magick and worked about just as well, as well as it's proprietary skeleton detection drivers, which prevented me from getting…
Did you consider bypassing the proprietary detection stuff and using the sensor data with another library, like OpenCV or depthJS?