Sad to see this - I recently talked to a startup that was using Kinect for at-home physical therapy. By no means a replacement for PT, but really a huge opportunity for people that didn't have regular/sufficient access to therapy. Hopefully something equivalent can cut through.
Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect
151–160 of 265 posts
Re: Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 an…
I went to a few museums last week on vacation. I was surprised to see how ubiquitous the Kinect was - almost every new-ish exhibit had something interactive that made use of the Kinect. Just when I was thinking about how much fun it would be to get one to play with, they killed it :(
Re: Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect
#153I wonder what the "followon product" discussions were like and what they said "no" to as a next generation.
I mean this seems like an idea whose time will come. What could they have built if they were targeting a product to release before Christmas?
Re: Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect
#154This 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…
> 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.
Well that's a silly comment, because by choosing not to make more then there would actually be fewer kinects in landfills than if they had decided to continue manufacturing. The decision to "build more" has absolutely nothing to do with folks deciding to throw away the ones they've already bought.
Re: Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
There are seated vr experiences too, but as a Vive owner, I don't think they're going to get cheap enough quickly enough to take off. Maybe we'll get attempt #3 taking off next decade..
I don't think price has much to do with it. Even if they were free I can't see them taking off.
Re: Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect
#156This is quite sad, seeing so many amazing hacked together project that uses the Kinect. I bought a fairly new one at thrift shop for only $15 dollar (!!) a few weeks back.
Re: Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect
#157Re: Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
XBox is missing several exclusives like Uncharted 4, Horizon: Zero Dawn, and Persona 5 so there are plenty of games on just one system. IMO, if you have both then it might not seem like a big deal but PS4 seems to have better exclusives and it's consistently selling 2x as much. It's also at 1/3 as many sales as the Xbox 360 so 'dead' may be over rated but it's not in a great place.
I have bought and played all of those games, and they're good games. 2017 has been a better year for PS4 exclusives than Xbox One, although maybe I just feel that way because I like the Forza Horizon games more than the Forza Motorsport games and I suck at Cuphead. There's still plenty of Xbox One exclusives that I'm happy I've played.
Something that has helped those games, and not the Xbox One, is that the exclusivity is just regarding other consoles: All of their big "exclusives" are released on PC too, which allowed people like me to skip buying the console altogether.
This is not necessarily great for Microsoft though, as licenses for third party games bring money, and people like me end up using their online store only when there's no other choice.
Re: Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect
#159There are lots of university projects developing with this device. This is very sad decision for them. I hope it will back soon.
Re: Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect
#160It's a magnificent device for tinkerers. My workplace picked up a few Kinects when we needed a quick & cheap motion capture solution to animate a few characters in our Unity game. We were quite impressed by how well it did; it could even do facial capture! We still had to hand-tune some of the keyframes, but it saved us countless hours of animating.
After getting all of our motion capture done, we wanted to see what else we could do with it. I stumbled across a [1]repo from a few years ago that live-streams the depth data as a point cloud system in the browser. So we cleaned up the code, set up a kinect to point at our office entrance, and now have it live-streaming in the header of our [2]website! It's a bit too heavy on mobile, so we're currently working on a fallback.
[1] https://github.com/jawj/websocket-kinect
[2] https://l2d.co/