
All the money in the world couldn’t make Kinect happen - MBCook
https://www.polygon.com/2020/1/14/21064608/microsoft-kinect-history-rise-and-fall
======
thevagrant
I still use Kinect for my young kids. They love it (Xbox One version). My
original Kinect broke so I picked up a second hand one for $10 somewhere. I
think Microsoft was on the cusp of a huge opportunity and blew it by listening
to hardcore gamers. Kinect type accessory that comes with the console (like
Xbox One) should have a big market potential. For myself, I only got
interested in it once I had kids and by then, Microsoft already had abandoned
it thus limiting how many titles I could purchase.

~~~
jinushaun
It wasn’t about hardcore gamers. I think you forgot that the Kinect made the
Xbox cost $100 more than the PlayStation. It probably singlehandedly gave Sony
the crown for this console generation.

Microsoft eventually dropped the Kinect and the price and sales of the Xbox
picked up considerably.

~~~
Grimm665
It was bad timing, since the console was released just months after the
Snowden reveal, so customers were perhaps justifiably skittish about having an
always connected camera in their house when all they wanted was a gaming
console.

------
theclaw
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.

~~~
dariusj18
This is essentially mouse vs touch screen.

------
ModernMech
The Kinect was a huge success, just not in gaming. At the time of its release
it revolutionized robotics. Equivalent sensors at the time cost thousands of
dollars compared to the hundred or so of a Kinect. We could buy a dozen of
them and allow undergrads to play with them, exposing them to CV algorithms
only grad students got to experience before. It opened up research to
replicability too. Before you would have a mapping paper done with a
specialized sensor. You would have to pay thousands for the specialty sensor
to create the same map. With the Kinect, everyone had the same hardware, so
mapping research became almost commoditized. It was an incredible to be to be
a roboticist.

~~~
amirhirsch
My former startup Zigfu (YC S11) made the installer for the OpenNI libraries
as well as the APIs for Unity3D and a browser plugin to support Javascript
Kinect applications. A significant number of Kinects were never used with an
Xbox, but rather were used by Kinect hackers to make other applications.

In my opinion the main failure of Kinect was Microsoft not providing a market
for the Kinect hackers --- had they embraced that incredibly motivated group,
they would have had a number of casual-games making $1-20 apps for Kinect on
Xbox. They seemed extraordinarily reticent to open up the Xbox ecosystem to a
broad set of developers. PrimeSense was the company that put out a free
(libre) skeleton tracking API in the months after the Kinect launch and it
took Microsoft quite a while to have an official Kinect for Windows SDK. No
one ever properly funded and developed a user-interface library for Kinect to
provide high level menu/list components for developers. Of all the games made,
only Dance Central had a usable gesture-controlled menu.

------
ben7799
From 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.

~~~
scandinavegan
> And the actual menus in that game were terrible... really hard to control
> and you'd give up and go looking for the controller.

I have Ring Fit for the Nintendo Switch. You attach one controller to the
physical ring that you can push or pull, rotate or flick up and down. You can
use ring motions to control menus, and even if I think it registers fine, it's
much more convenient to use the controller.

I'm so happy that they kept that as an option, and I always use the attached
controller rather than flipping the ring around. It's just quicker and more
convenient.

------
Singletoned
Xbox Fitness was the best exercise app I've ever used in my life. The most
thorough work outs and hardest sustained effort I've ever put into exercising.
I was absolutely gutted when they "sunsetted" it.

They killed it so aggressively that they deleted it off your console so that
there was no way you could play it. There was clearly internal politics going
on behind the scenes.

~~~
mrec
Fear of exposure to litigation if someone injured themselves, maybe?

~~~
Red_Leaves_Flyy
Or fear of future litigation after a quiet settlement?

------
slimsag
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/](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/kinect-dk/)

~~~
Relys
I already use a Kinect for full body tracking in VR Chat lol

------
just_myles
I don't know. Seems to me that there is some good technology in there. I think
what hurt it ultimately, and forgive me if I am repeating this but, the launch
of the xbox one x with the kinect seems to have hurt it more. As I recall
there was controversy over "always on" to receive commands from the users that
rub the community the wrong way.

~~~
kohtatsu
Honestly Microsoft is creepy as hell the past two years. Similarly as bad as
Google/Facebook imo, and they're bald-faced about it.

For those who don't know; the One's kinect mic is always on by default, and
says hello to you if it detects (what it thinks is) your voice recognition. I
wouldn't be surprised if they wanted the camera on full-time too!

I think the whole thing is tone-deaf, like the windows 10 privacy settings
charade.

~~~
ck425
That's the exact reason I will never have an Alexa, Google Home or any
equivalent in my home. I was a massive xbox fan and that made it an automatic
no go for me.

------
throwaway_tech
I will never forget the first time I went to a friends house and saw the
Kinect.

Of course I asked for a demo, and my friend proceeded to play a volleyball
game, within about a minute he jumped in the air to spike the ball...his hand
went right into the ceiling fan.

It seemed like amazing technology before/during/after the demo, but I never
even bothered trying it after witnessing that.

~~~
jniedrauer
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.

~~~
xnzakg
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.

~~~
andybak
[https://www.driver4vr.com/](https://www.driver4vr.com/)

------
subculture
Kinect: The Velvet Underground of game development tech [1]

[1]
[https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/03/01/velvet/](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/03/01/velvet/)

------
nitwit005
A lot of these devices seem great for sales and hype, but kind of irritating
once you get to using them.

Speech recognition is something people always react positively to in a demo,
but it gets irritating quite quickly, and can be annoying to people around
you.

With the Wii mote they seemed careful to also support more conventional button
controls, which meant you could often just switch to that.

------
PaulHoule
The big problem I saw with the Kinect One was that it wasn't any better in
practice than the Kinect 360 was even though it was a lot better on paper.

I've been disappointed with depth cameras so far. I have one on my Alienware
laptop that works well for face recognition but doesn't have an API to do
anything else with it, probably because characterization of what the devices
sees would be the first step to defeat it.

I've thought about getting a RealSense camera but have never quite pulled the
trigger.

~~~
andybak
> I've thought about getting a RealSense camera but have never quite pulled
> the trigger.

Pick up a Kinect v2 second hand (as little as $20) and a 3rd party PC adapter
($40 - $50 if my memory serves me correctly).

Bulkier than the Realsense but has more functionality out of the box (skeletal
tracking mainly) and just as much 3rd party support in terms of libraries etc.

------
ivanhoe
IMHO Kinect and Wii motion games are really perfect for young kids as they
solve most of the problems that parents usually have with computer games:
there's a physical activity, there're complex body motions that develop the
balance and motor skills, and also the distance from the screen is changing
all the time so there's less strain on eyes. Too bad it seems to be too small
niche for the cost of it.

~~~
watwut
They are not. They are difficult for kids to controll. Plus kids randomly hit
furniture and people and anything else in the room.

Also, parental issues are a lot about addictiveness of games, kids acting
aggressively after whether out of frustration or cause they don't want to stop
and refusing to participate on other activities.

~~~
tudorw
If a child acts aggressively when denied something they want then they need to
be helped to learn better behavior control. I cannot imagine that before video
games there was never any similar behaviour, perhaps it was over denied access
to fuzzy felts, or your book you 'never take your head out of' :)

~~~
lotsofpulp
I am under the impression that some video game designers are using
psychological techniques similar to those used by slot machine makers to take
advantage of every weakness in the mind to create an addiction. If so, it’s
not comparable to behavior from reading a good book.

~~~
tudorw
I concede somewhat, you are correct, the psychological manipulation present in
contemporary game design certainly ups the stakes, still, we can teach our
children that gambling is a risky activity, it will cost time and money, lost
opportunities, so there is still hope.

~~~
lotsofpulp
Continuing deeper into this conversation would lead towards a discussion of
how accurate a model of "free will" is, but I'm not so sure that certain
activities are so different than addictive drugs such as opioids.

If people become so good at pressing the right buttons in the brain, the
probability of success of "teaching" children to not get addicted will be very
low, and the best chance of success is abstain from it, just like with
opioids.

------
jimbob45
Kinect was a political casualty, not a market one. There's no reason for it
not to still exist (as an addon) save that they stopped manufacturing it.

~~~
Mobius01
I think it was mishandled. There was a lack of compelling software,
particularly when compared to Nintendo’s Wii output that also relied on motion
controls.

Then the next revision was included with the Xbox One, increasing the overall
price of the console while still lacking compelling software.

If Microsoft had positioned it as an entirely optional accessory with a great
library of exclusive titles, maybe it would have found an audience.

~~~
usrusr
Motion gaming is so different from button mashing that it benefits from a
clean separation that makes sure that nothing in the content library ever
tries do dabble in both.

Nintendo got close with deemphasizing graphics on the Wii, but even they
suffered from a mixed bag reputation. A bad console that is also an awesome
fitness toy is worse than a good fitness toy that isn't a console at all.
Marketing motion as an optional add-on is terrible. I believe that the Wii
would have fared better if it had been even cheape/lower spec and motion
focused with a parallelly introduced full version marketed as the Gamecube
successor to keep the console expectations off it's back.

With today's technology (ubiquitous HD screens, consumer grade wired PCIe and
well established GPU APIs) a possible compromise might be a low spec
standalone motion gaming system that can optionally use it's full spec game
console sibling as eGPU for added HD fidelty. The important property of this
hypothetical ecosystem architecture is be that the motion part wouldn't be an
optional _controller_ for the big console, muddying the console's library with
half-baked motion support but keep it's own focused library and just make that
optionally playable with above-reference visuals for gear accumulators.

------
TheAdamist
Kinect 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.

------
gwbas1c
I 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.

~~~
satori99
I enjoyed it as a super cheap depth camera, and never used it for gaming.

------
alexhutcheson
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.

~~~
gambiting
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.

~~~
alexhutcheson
Yeah but the Kinect is no longer sold, so the phone option is the default
experience going forward. Didn't know about the PS Camera actually.

------
refactormonkey
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.

------
phkahler
The article touches on one of the core issues. It didnt come with every xbox,
which caused developers to not support it. And then there was the existing
base of hard core gamers playing stuff like Halo. Their expectations of how
games are played were probably incompatible with getting off the couch.

Wii used motion control for everything, and the Nintendo audience isnt the CoD
gamers either. People didnt use the Wii to play games, they played Wii. Older
people played Wii. The expensive peripheral for Wii was the balance board, and
it was used for fitness games, not epic war games.

Wii was a thing. Kinect was just a peripheral mismatched with xbox. There are
some good games, but it's nothing like the Wii ecosystem.

------
ghaff
Around 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.

~~~
PaulHoule
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 poor accuracy and the physical difficulty of holding your arm up
and pointing at the screen it was unplayable.

The most interesting things going on with motion control these days have to do
with fitness trackers and similar devices.

~~~
majormajor
> 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.

Wii Sports and Wii Fit were console movers. They were novelty console movers,
sure, but they moved things. Take them and the motion controls away and you've
got Gamecube 2, with just the fun first party Nintendo games and much lower
console sales.

------
rasz
All you need to know about Kinect is in this video, 'Kinect GEL Ride'
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWbLOFGSEDo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWbLOFGSEDo)

------
spacechild1
While article mentions that the Kinect has been used by engineers, scientists
and even the military, it has also been very popular in the arts, e.g. for
interactive dance pieces or installations, up to this day!

~~~
soylentcola
I played around with the games for a few months when it came out, but I spent
much more time with it hooked up to my computer and experimenting with it in
Processing and TouchDesigner, etc. I also loved seeing how people were using
it for mo-cap stuff in animation projects.

I never got the second one and while I initially thought about getting one of
PrimeSense's own depth cams (Carmine I believe it was called), they were
bought by Apple who shut down development of their OpenNI middleware.

I think it was forked to some degree and still exists but I'd gotten
distracted with other projects and demands on time so I haven't kept up. I
also bought a dev version of one of Intel's depth cameras, but it had its own
issues. Nobody really seemed to be working on them and I couldn't find the
time to learn the kind of skills I'd need to hack together my own solutions.

I may have to dig that stuff out and see if there have been any interesting
developments in the ensuing years.

------
mbzi
Without the Kinect (1 & 2) and Primesense cameras I wouldn't have been able to
make numerous award winning retail Augmented Reality makeup and clothing tryon
experiences. For that alone I have a huge appreciation to the pioneers in this
area. I no longer work within FashTech but for a time period (~7 years) it was
so much fun!

It is a shame the B2B depth camera space has not really improved in the last
few years, old colleagues and friends have had to resource discontinued old
devices off ebay, etc, due to lack of alternatives.

------
programminggeek
I 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.

------
eddhead
Kinect failed when Milo (& Kate) from Lionhead didn't ship.

------
askafriend
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 further develop the software interface and APIs.

It's really that simple.

~~~
gambiting
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.

~~~
mjevans
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.

------
billconan
I still hope to have something like Kinect for exercising.

~~~
ceejayoz
A combination of Beat Saber and Pistol Whip in VR does the trick for me.

~~~
ajuc
Superhot is good too. Like callanetics - you have to move slowly and keep
inconvenient poses :)

~~~
dukoid
Superhot worked best of the three for me, but now I have played through... :-/

~~~
andybak
One of the best game mechanics ever squandered on one of the shortest games.

~~~
dukoid
I'd buy a mission pack....

------
blackrock
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.

~~~
deltron3030
Nah, AI will calibrate and then calculate your bone movement by measuring tiny
vibrations through earphones. Every moving part of you body could be
measurable that way.

And why would you move your hands if you don't directly interact with objects,
you could track your tongue touching or sliding along your teeth, best
interface ever.

~~~
blackrock
That would be pretty slick indeed. Although it might prematurely wear out my
gums and enamels.

But then, what if you have a sudden gag reflex? Or a random epileptic seizure?
And the AI thinks you want to do a format /f c:, or a rm -rf / command? Hmm..
the OS had better firewall off those special commands.

~~~
deltron3030
You might have to get used to it, like with speaking. And yes, a safety net
that's already baked into your workflow could prevent bad consequences from
potential input errors.

Use trash instead of rm -rf for example, it makes sure that files you remove
land in your trash bin. Look this program up if you don't already use it,
seriously.

------
sand500
Anyone remember when all FIRST robotics competition teams got Kinects?

------
spinchange
Kinect Theremin Demo (2011)
[https://youtu.be/RHFJJRbBoLw](https://youtu.be/RHFJJRbBoLw)

------
waste_monk
IMO the main reason for why the kinect failed was because gamers tend to not
be in good physical shape and are not exercise-motivated, to put it kindly.
Exercise games on the Wii worked because of the audience of that platform
(casual gamers who are generally fitter than "hardcore" console gamers).

Wii sports would have failed on Xbox, and Kinect adventures would have worked
well enough on the Wii.

------
qwerty456127
TL/DR but it seems extremely weird to me Kinect is not everywhere. It seems an
obvious convenience everybody should and would want to use, like a wheel.

~~~
icebraining
Well, I don't think I own "a wheel". I own stuff that happens to include
wheels. What would those be for the Kinect, besides games?

~~~
redisman
Camera based controls don't really work outside for example so I'm also having
a hard time coming up with ideas.

------
aabeshou
is it just me or is the present tense in this article really distracting?

