I still hope to have something like Kinect for exercising.
A colleague JUST told me about this:
https://ringfitadventure.nintendo.com/
All the money in the world couldn’t make Kinect happen
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Re: All the money in the world couldn’t make Kinect happen
#12Around that time, it looked like a lot of innovation was happening in input devices. There was Kinect. But there was also the Wii, 6 degrees of freedom controllers, and others I'm forgetting about. But it mostly sort of petered out.
The usual hype cycle... Nintendo coming up with a new motion-controlled console? Of course Microsoft and Sony have to do that too. Some guy launching a Kickstarter project for a VR headset using a highres screen originally intended for smartphones? Suddenly everyone and their dog is building VR headsets. 3D movies moderately successful in cinemas? Suddenly every TV maker is selling "3D-enabled" TVs. Etc. etc. etc.
Re: All the money in the world couldn’t make Kinect happen
#13Around that time, it looked like a lot of innovation was happening in input devices. There was Kinect. But there was also the Wii, 6 degrees of freedom controllers, and others I'm forgetting about. But it mostly sort of petered out.
I think the Wii was successful despite the Wiimote as opposed to because of it, but people didn't understand that at the time. Nintendo's first party games added a few fun details using the motion controls, but other than Wii Sports and a few novelty titles there weren't many games for which motion control played a pivotal role. There was a SimCity game that tried to use the WiiMote like a light pen, but between the…
My opinion may be skewed by the fact that I went through a period when the Wiimote and whatever the thing you stood on was called were integral to the various Wii sports games that I played. (There was a tennis one and a snowboarding one.)
I think I also played World on Goo on my Wii.
But I lost interest in it all after a while.
I tend to agree that we could do a lot more interesting things with today's bands although I at least haven't seen anything especially integrated into video games.
Re: All the money in the world couldn’t make Kinect happen
#14From the article:
“There were times when you’d be demoing [games] and nothing would be happening; you would just be rendering the video from the perspective of the Kinect on a big TV,” Skillman says. “And then kids would always charge it. That was weird. Kids would just charge the TV.”
That is so true.. I've seen little kids do that so many times. They're not sure what to do so they just decide they better run up to the TV.
Our family made a go of playing with Kinect (XBox One) but we gave up after not too long. All the games/controls were just too buggy overall.
Whatever the Dance game was.. that actually worked OK for the gameplay. Until our kid fell into a coffee table or kicked someone in the you know what. And the actual menus in that game were terrible... really hard to control and you'd give up and go looking for the controller.
Still.. I don't hate the Kinect. I really hate(d) Rock Band and the awful controllers that came with it. What a waste of money on XBox One. I spent more time on the phone with PDP Customer Support than I played the game.
Re: All the money in the world couldn’t make Kinect happen
#15is it just me or is the present tense in this article really distracting?
Re: All the money in the world couldn’t make Kinect happen
#16Re: All the money in the world couldn’t make Kinect happen
#17I think Kinect would have been fine if they didn't bundle it with the XBox One.
As in, it would have been a solid niche input device, but most games don't need it or benefit greatly from it, so adding $100 to the price of the console made it bad business.
There is some amazing technology there, but as a gamer it didn't make me want it. It was like VR kinda still is - a very cool niche that hasn't caught on yet.
It's okay for niche products to exist and be profitable if you don't require them to sell millions of units.
Re: All the money in the world couldn’t make Kinect happen
#18I saw this headline and thought, "what was the Kinect, some kind of VR headset?"
Then I opened the article, and saw the picture, and thought, "oh that looks familiar."
Gosh, I totally forgot about that thing.
[Edit] As in, I once picked up a VR Boy on the cheap when I was a kid. It was really fun, but the games were sorely lacking. I wonder if anyone really enjoyed the Kinect.
Re: All the money in the world couldn’t make Kinect happen
#19Kinect wasn't compatible with either of the places I have lived. I wanted to use it, but couldn't.
Concrete apartment block, the tv wasn't far enough from the couch. Would I have annoyed my neighbors downstairs with jumping? Unsure.
Old wooden house, plenty of space, but jumping shakes the entire building and probably isn't good for the floor. Back into the junk box it went, oh well.
Re: All the money in the world couldn’t make Kinect happen
#20Kinect: The Velvet Underground of game development tech [1]