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Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect

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Re: Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect

#111

Post by tchock23 »

dalfonso wrote: post #96

One thing that hasn't been mentioned: Kinect was Microsoft's reaction to Wii's success. I worked at Microsoft when the first Kinect came out. I spoke with a few members of that team (non-engineers). My question was very clear -- are you expecting this to takeover for controller based gaming? I don't recall all the responses, but I think the overall sentiment was along the lines of "No, but it might", whereas my thoug…

This is my concern with VR not taking off with the mainstream. Many gamers (myself included) want to plop down on the couch and not move around much. Many of the VR experiences coming out require movement, not to mention the initial effort to put on the headset.

I'm a huge proponent of VR (backer #238 of the Rift on Kickstarter), but I worry VR headsets will end up in the dustbin with the Kinect for this very reason...

Re: Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect

#112

Post by WorldMaker »

dawnerd wrote: post #45
WorldMaker wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Speaking of magic, universal uses Kinect for Harry Potter in Knockturn Alley. Was surprised to see a simple Kinect running it (hard to see but it’s in a box to the left of the skeleton magic wand experience).

The Kinect has done wonders for amusement park and museum efforts. At this point I'm more surprised when those sorts of museum and amusement projects aren't using a Kinect. (...and more often than that it's simply because an old expensive system hasn't broken yet, but soon as it breaks you expect it to be replaced with a Kinect.)

For that reason, the commodification of the Kinect really has been a boon for science and entertainment. There are some commodity Kinect knock-offs out there (Intel's cameras and sensors come to mind), but selling millions of Kinects means that they will probably stay important to museum projects.

The secondary market will probably remain flooded with Kinects for a while, but maybe (hopefully) by the time it becomes hard to get a decent priced Kinect for such cool little projects there will be a Kinect 3 or similar ready. (Or Microsoft will sell the Kinect brand to a hardware manufacturer.)

Re: Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect

#114

Post by Qworg »

bhouston wrote: post #105
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...

I'm pretty sure cheap and high quality lidar is coming very very quickly - so many companies working on it. There will be no market for an awkward kinect. Kinect is not great compared to modern lidar systems anyhow, it was just more accessible.

Cost/unit was an incredible driver of adoption though. What other depth sensor could you pick up at a local thrift store for $10?

Re: Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect

#115

Post by Qworg »

jcelerier wrote: post #89
robotresearcher wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Most of the development in realsenses has been discontinued a few months ago. We used one (SR300) at the company and discovered that some particular poses (two persons making a kissing motion) would just make the latest SDK (R3) crash, even without feature & gesture recognition active. The answer? "EWONTFIX, use the older SDK, this won't be developed anymore anyways". Besides, the kinect has honestly better specs, a…

We were very disappointed with the current generation of RealSense devices. The next generation ones look good though - more based on the Tyzx acquisition.

Re: Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect

#116

Post by Bartweiss »

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...

It's still wild to me how consumer hardware outpaced cheap lab tech so decisively around 2010-2012.

At the time I was in a research lab that needed wireless networking + high-def video + light source + on-device processing + battery power + small form factor. It turns out that even compared to Raspberry Pi, the cheapest possible solution to that problem was "buy old Androids on Ebay and add external batteries". A handful of years before that we would have been cobbling together a $500 device, or more realistically scrapping the whole project.

The whole model of feature-dense sensors suddenly crossed from something for major production runs and custom orders into single-unit consumer products, and I'm not sure people really noticed how big an impact it had on research.

Re: Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect

#117

Post by Qworg »

WorldMaker wrote: post #30
larrik wrote: post #7

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…

Kinectimals was actually well beyond the standard skeletonization system - I think they rewrote a chunk of the stack to allow for younger kids to use it and have it perform well.

Re: Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect

#118

Post by squarefoot »

Bjorkbat wrote: post #67

This 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…

"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"

This. And thanks to software/hardware patents, the technology will die with the product, or remain dormant until the owner will either decide to make something else with it or (not holding my breath) release it under a FOSS license. In the meantime, like always, landfills in the 3rd world will be inundated by more hardware which could be still perfectly useable if its life didn't depend on the wishes of a single company.

Re: Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect

#119

Post by make3 »

tchock23 wrote: post #111
dalfonso wrote: post #96

One thing that hasn't been mentioned: Kinect was Microsoft's reaction to Wii's success. I worked at Microsoft when the first Kinect came out. I spoke with a few members of that team (non-engineers). My question was very clear -- are you expecting this to takeover for controller based gaming? I don't recall all the responses, but I think the overall sentiment was along the lines of "No, but it might", whereas my thoug…

This is my concern with VR not taking off with the mainstream. Many gamers (myself included) want to plop down on the couch and not move around much. Many of the VR experiences coming out require movement, not to mention the initial effort to put on the headset. I'm a huge proponent of VR (backer #238 of the Rift on Kickstarter), but I worry VR headsets will end up in the dustbin with the Kinect for this very reason.…

vr has larger problems. mainly, the nausea thing: your character can't accelerate at all without giving you really unpleasant nausea. The strength of that nausea isn't being exaggerated. That takes out all games that you would think are good ideas for vr, like sports games, fighter jet games, .. first person shooters where your character walks around.. basically first person anything where your character isn't always moving at constant speed or teleporting is ruled out. It's a shame.. but it's really how it is

Re: Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect

#120

Post by Qworg »

philnelson wrote: post #59
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.

How's the skeletonization these days? Still using NiTE?
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