All the money in the world couldn’t make Kinect happen • Hacker News Board

Re: All the money in the world couldn’t make Kinect happen

#61

Post by slimsag » Thu, Jan 16, 2020, 8:27 AM UTC

I just bought an Azure Kinect DK[1] which should arrive today; Microsoft is clearly aware Kinect has many other opportunities outside of Xbox.

A massively undersold market for Kinect is VR. The thing I see nearly all high-end Steam VR headset users wanting is full-body tracking, and surprise surprise the old Kinect is used there a bit heavily already but is lacking in precision and pose detection algorithms. I would not be surprised if the Azure Kinect DK becomes heavily used in the VR community soon, since it improves both of those pretty heavily.

[1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/kinect-dk/

Re: All the money in the world couldn’t make Kinect happen

#62

Post by andybak » Thu, Jan 16, 2020, 8:49 AM UTC

xnzakg wrote: post #51

jniedrauer wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same problem exists in VR, except in VR you're blind to the outside world. The chaperone boundary partially solves this, but every VR forum is full of pictures of smashed TVs. In spite of this, the tech is gaining momentum. (Not to mention, it has been life changing for me personally in so many ways.) I don't think this alone is a valid criticism of full body tracking systems.

Honestly a Kinect for VR would be amazing. Could remove some of the "I'm standing in front of the TV waving my arms around" feeling you get with normal Kinect games.

https://www.driver4vr.com/

Re: All the money in the world couldn’t make Kinect happen

#63

Post by refactormonkey » Thu, Jan 16, 2020, 8:54 AM UTC

I still have Kinect1 for Xbox 360, and it is really amazing. Dance Central is great for learning how to dance and exercise. Kinect Party my kids play till this date.

When Microsoft released it one Christmas season it sold really well. 10 million units sold. It was a huge success.

Then Microsoft bundled it with XBox One but didn't include any killer Kinect games with it. That "killed" it more then anything else. Some people liked voice commands, but you don't buy Kinect for voice commands. If they would include newest Dance Central or some other killer title as part of the package, a lot more people would buy into it.

Personally I was waiting for such a game to buy XBox One, but it never came. Microsoft could have used Kinect to really differentiate themselves, like Sony is doing with VR, but instead they just dropped it.

Re: All the money in the world couldn’t make Kinect happen

#64

Post by mjevans » Thu, Jan 16, 2020, 8:58 AM UTC

askafriend wrote: post #60

There's only one reason Kinect didn't happen. Microsoft dropped the requirement for it to ship with every Xbox. The moment they backtracked and made it optional, they killed any potential it might have had. Developers didn't see a point in supporting an optional accessory that few would spend the extra money to buy. As a result, no good games came out that supported it, and Microsoft themselves lost the incentive to…

While I agree, what drove them to make that decision was not having a good set of launch titles to make the device and it's use a killer-app to drive the whole package.

Re: All the money in the world couldn’t make Kinect happen

#65

Post by gambiting » Thu, Jan 16, 2020, 9:00 AM UTC

askafriend wrote: post #60

There's only one reason Kinect didn't happen. Microsoft dropped the requirement for it to ship with every Xbox. The moment they backtracked and made it optional, they killed any potential it might have had. Developers didn't see a point in supporting an optional accessory that few would spend the extra money to buy. As a result, no good games came out that supported it, and Microsoft themselves lost the incentive to…

Nothing is ever that simple, and I'm saying this as a game developer working for a large studio.

To me, the most obvious issue wasn't the bundling or not bundling of kinect with every xbox - it was the fact that having it active was actively taking up processing power of the xbox, which was already more limited than that of the rival PS4. If it had been "free" to use from computational standpoint, then more games would have integrated it I am sure. But if using kinect in your game meant producing an inferior product for that platform(from performance/visual point of view) then kinect support was the first thing to drop. Kinect was dead for that reason even before Microsoft decided to sell kinect-less Xbox One.

Re: All the money in the world couldn’t make Kinect happen

#66

Post by vl » Thu, Jan 16, 2020, 9:06 AM UTC

dageshi wrote: post #39

thevagrant wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but the early backlash and signaling from Microsoft probably scared off a lot of developers. A lot of mistakes were made. The costs were also a big factor. Perhaps the flaws with the tech were insurmountable. I can't help but believe with the same opportunity, using a different approach to market and promote the technology, it would have become a stable accessory with a very big customerbase. I've had many discus…

Those consoles already existed, the Wii and Wii U, Nintendo moved away from the whole idea. It's a good idea in theory but it didn't catch on and realistically kids just aren't a big enough market to concentrate on in the context of gaming, the average gamer is in their 30's and has a ton of disposable income, those are who the console manufacturers are targetting. If you do want a console for kids, well the Switch e…

Except they didn’t. JoyCons are detachable from Switch and can be used for gestures. Nintendo recently released Ring Fit Adventure - adventure game that incorporates fitness.

Re: All the money in the world couldn’t make Kinect happen

#67

Post by mjevans » Thu, Jan 16, 2020, 9:08 AM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #65

askafriend wrote: post #60

There's only one reason Kinect didn't happen. Microsoft dropped the requirement for it to ship with every Xbox. The moment they backtracked and made it optional, they killed any potential it might have had. Developers didn't see a point in supporting an optional accessory that few would spend the extra money to buy. As a result, no good games came out that supported it, and Microsoft themselves lost the incentive to…

Nothing is ever that simple, and I'm saying this as a game developer working for a large studio. To me, the most obvious issue wasn't the bundling or not bundling of kinect with every xbox - it was the fact that having it active was actively taking up processing power of the xbox, which was already more limited than that of the rival PS4. If it had been "free" to use from computational standpoint, then more games wou…

A cross-platform title already would be very unlikely to use Kinect. For those games this hardware would just be dead weight. However, (as I was thinking of in my other reply), a killer app based around Kinect might have driven support for getting Microsoft hardware rather than Sony hardware.

Re: All the money in the world couldn’t make Kinect happen

#68

Post by gambiting » Thu, Jan 16, 2020, 9:08 AM UTC

alexhutcheson wrote: post #24

Just Dance was awesome, and significantly better than its current iterations which only have data from controller accelerometers. None of the other games I tried were compelling, though.

What do you mean? Just Dance 2020 for Xbox One still supports Kinect if you have one, and the PS4 version supports dancing with the PS Camera. You don't have to use the Move controllers or dance with your smartphone if you don't want to.

Re: All the money in the world couldn’t make Kinect happen

#69

Post by theclaw » Thu, Jan 16, 2020, 9:10 AM UTC

In my opinion the problem with Kinect was that it was necessarily a 1-1 mapping between your performance and the character on-screen. The Wii, in comparison, could only sense broad gestures. The direct mapping of kinect requires a great performance by the player to make a great performance in-game. This isn’t what gamers are used to - they’re used to a kind of ability amplification through the controller, where they press a few buttons or waggle the Wii remote and Spiderman does a sweet backflip.

Playing Kinect games was either frustrating because the game would not recognise your gestures, overly complicated because there were too many possible gestures and no obvious affordances to the user other than ‘move your whole body somehow’, or simply too physically difficult for some players to perform.

It’s ironic that such a high fidelity input device actually limits the kind of games you can design for it. Some of the best Kinect games were those that used the input data for purely cosmetic purposes.

Re: All the money in the world couldn’t make Kinect happen

#70

Post by saberdancer » Thu, Jan 16, 2020, 9:22 AM UTC

blackrock wrote: post #52

I suspect the next user interface revolution will be to use an AI camera to recognize your hand gesture movements to manipulate windows. And to recognize your facial gestures to pop up an interactive helper like Clippy.

Oculus Quest (standalone VR headset) has released hand tracking as a beta feature. It works surprisingly well but there needs to be a lot of work on designing proper UX for this type of input. For example, pressing a button in VR or on screen is hard to do if your hands are in the air, Oculus so far is using something they call "passive haptics" which is in fact instead of pressing a button in real life, you tap one of your fingers on part of your body/hand. For example to "click" you tap your thumb and your finger.

The technology is there.