Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect

#221

Post by clarke78 » Thu, Oct 26, 2017, 1:35 AM UTC

ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #130

esturk wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's definitely a huge part of it. But MS would still be happy to lose money on kinect if game makers were making nice games for it. The only game in my house that could ever utilize it was the original Dancing games from the demos. The last time I saw my daughter playing it, she was holding her phone, and using it for the sensor instead of the kinect through their integrated app. I asked why she would do that? Jus…

Have a +1 for being a good parent and letting her play however she wanted. Gotta love kids

Re: Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect

#222

Post by burntrelish1273 » Thu, Oct 26, 2017, 1:42 AM UTC

Ah, the Kinect... platform for the first Matterport revision. (Matt B. is so next-level ridiculously creative, Adam Savage would tip his fedora.) Matterport is a really neat mesh/texture capture and stitching platform that I only saw rough demos run based on multiple fixed CCTVs to do forensic 3D scene reconstruction from UC Davis researchers some years before.

Also, a first-hand story for this category:

Once upon a time, next door to my grandparents house in SJ/Los Gatos region, there lived a renter... not any renter, but a corporate/PhD/engineer whom quit his job to start a startup. After some casual conversation, he mentioned he was working on then something stealth-mode involving machine vision and 3D screen interfacing (think Kinect meets Wii controllers). Many Maybachs, Merc S-series and Aston Martins came by to due-diligence and meet said entrepreneur's startup, team and tech at this rental 3-BD with a dedicated meeting room near Hwy 85. The odd thing was, I never heard what happened to him and has baby. That is until I ran into someone whom did some work for him several years later. (The Valley is a very small place; heck, yours truly toured Woz'es and coworker's homes under construction when I was like 7, but I was more interested in the steep road (Harwood IIRC) out front for high-speed skateboarding/bicycling.)

Anyhow, it turns out, the night before the demo, the CEO made a source code change or something that broke the build. And, there weren't backups because they weren't using a (D)VCS. (Ouch.) I think it was acquired for an "undisclosed sum" for IP and wound down IIRC. What sucks is having to go back to work, kind of a tech "bar closing walk-of-shame," but there's always next time.

Re: Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect

#223

Post by nsxwolf » Thu, Oct 26, 2017, 1:47 AM UTC

andybak wrote: post #209

nsxwolf wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the maker community hanging on to their Kinects is going to put a dent in the e-waste impact. People are tossing these things in droves because they are a useless waste of space.

Useless unless you want to do motion capture or any one of a bunch of other non-useless tasks.

That’s a tiny fraction of total units sold.

Re: Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect

#224

Post by andrepd » Thu, Oct 26, 2017, 2:18 AM UTC

PopsiclePete wrote: post #199

andrepd wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Amazon and Google are caught up in a dumb contest to see who can produce the best hockey-puck-sized speaker that can add items to your shopping list But you know why it is so, don't you? The allure for an information company of having an always-on, always internet connected, high-sensitivity microphone, running proprietary software doing god knows what, the allure of having such a device in as many homes as possible…

Which is why you buy it, and when not at home, play really loud, awkward and uncomfortable recordings of someone having bad, sweaty, cringe-inducing sex. For hours on end. If you're into software, you could make it exciting. Perhaps write a scraper to strip the audio off porn clips, mix it up with old Khruschev speeches? Could be a tactic to fight systems like these - overwhelm them with garbage data.

Overwhelming with garbage data is definitely a good tactice to pollute the nice data they collect. See https://adnauseam.io/

Re: Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect

#225

Post by agar » Thu, Oct 26, 2017, 2:22 AM UTC

peterlk wrote: post #48

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 was talking to someone 3 days ago about how his company has been hoarding Kinects because they knew this day was coming. 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 com…

> I think robotics research is probably a reason why they're discontinuing it. Why support something that only exists outside the walled garden?

This is pretty unfair. Microsoft released Kinect 2.0 for Windows[1], with a developer SDK, specifically for the community to hack on. It even supports Windows Embedded.

I can't in my wildest dreams imagine that they thought that product would be a money maker.

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=445...

Re: Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect

#226

Post by odbol_ » Thu, Oct 26, 2017, 2:27 AM UTC

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…

Oddly enough, both Wii and Kinect were very successful outside their official gaming applications, because people were able to hack their protocols and use them in ways the manufacturers never intended.

I remember buying a Wii just for the gesture control capabilities. I wrote a whole VJ performance app based on Wii gestures, so you could crossfade video and scrub through animations (the video equivalent of a DJ scratching records), just by waving your hands around. I toured with that thing for years... it was so essential to my performance that I stashed a few candles in my bag, so I could use them for IR tracking in case the sensor bar stopped working.

I then bought a Kinect and used it in a couple performances, projecting 3d mapped effects on to the band onstage. Even with VR/AR tech now: it starts with games but then gets co-opted into art and music. Open, hackable hardware is so important for society.

Re: Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect

#227

Post by burnte » Thu, Oct 26, 2017, 2:31 AM UTC

gerdesj wrote: post #213

"Launched in 2010 with a $500 million marketing campaign" I am very, very, far from being a MS apologist but I think that dropping Kinect is a really stupid idea, strategically. MS have dropped quite a few balls recently and this is another one. No doubt in the boardroom this will be an obvious slash to balance the books but it is a bloody stupid idea when you look a bit wider. This thing was/is a bit of a game chang…

Kinect is the same thing today that touch screens were in the 80s; touted as a revolution that will take over everywhere, then people realize sitting there waving your arms for yours is not enjoyable, and then it finds a niche and stabilizes at a much smaller size than everyone expected.

Re: Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect

#228

Post by agar » Thu, Oct 26, 2017, 2:31 AM UTC

make3 wrote: post #119

tchock23 wrote: post #111

Earlier 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.…

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…

Have you actually played VR games recently?

The most popular games are flight simulators and first person shooters where people walk around (Elite Dangerous, Eve: Valkyrie, FSX, Onward, Pavlov, From Other Suns). The best games released, Lone Echo and Echo Arena, take place in zero-gravity environments with highly non-constant speed and no teleportation.

Any game that gets released without joystick/trackpad locomotion will get a flood of angry message board postings.

Nausea is certainly a concern, but huge strides have been made in addressing it for the vast majority of players.

Re: Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect

#229

Post by sirmike_ » Thu, Oct 26, 2017, 2:59 AM UTC

freeloop3 wrote: post #128

emodendroket wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main reason Sony killed OtherOS was that they began to think it could be used to circumvent copy protection for games. In Kinect's case I'm guessing the pricing was set at least in part with the idea that the games would make up for low-to-negative profit margins.

I'm not so sure it was so cut and dried as that. The air force was using them to create a supercomputer using other-OS and Sony was selling it as a loss. I think they were worried about people buying them up and not purchasing games.

I think it is but for a more base reason. If they cut it, no man hours have to care for it. Simple monetary explanation. It sucked when they cut it.

Re: Microsoft Has Stopped Manufacturing The Kinect

#230

Post by partiallypro » Thu, Oct 26, 2017, 3:08 AM UTC

ekianjo wrote: post #220

partiallypro wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I'm not mistaken the Xbox One and PS4 both sold at faster paces than their predecessors.

The Xbox One? I'd be very surprised if it did. The PS4, certainly, because the PS3 was a pretty bad experience for Sony.

Yes, and as of current, and the Xbox One X is the fastest selling pre-order in Xbox history. Each generation has sold faster than then next. I think this is largely attributable (in the XB360 -> XB1; PS3 -> PS4) to the fact that there was such a large gap between generations, so there was pent up demand. Don't mistake "faster selling" with more overall sales by the end of the generation.

As for the PS3 being a bad experience for Sony, that only applies to the first units. By the end of the generation, Sony was almost parity with Microsoft on units sold. So too has Xbox One started to catch up with PS4 (in the U.S.) Microsoft still sells more software per unit though, if I am not mistaken.