
The Future of Kinect - ghosh
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/2014/jun14/06-05kinect.aspx
======
ghshephard
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that wasn't so much a "Future of Kinect" as it
was some background on all the effort it takes to make the Kinect technology
work, right?

~~~
drzaiusapelord
This is what I'm seeing as well. Not sure what's going on with the Kinect now
that its no longer bundled with the Xbox. I think that decoupling is sane
move. The Kinect seems to be magical at all things except gaming and a $100
premium for it doesn't make sense when your competitor is outselling you.
Outside of the dance games, it really never found its calling and you can only
sell so many dance games.

Damage control regarding the Kinect is everywhere now, including this article.
I just saw that the game Destiny is jettisoning Kinect support and because of
that, is now playable at a higher resolution. MS is scrambling to make the
"Kinect reserve" configurable instead of static. I believe the June update for
the Xbox has this functionality, but how many devs will just go, "Who cares"
and set it zero just like Bungie did with Destiny? Most I assume, especially
if their games play at 720p on Xbox w/ Kinect but 1080p on PS4.

I really think the Kinect is more or less dead and have blogged about it in
the past:

[http://nothingjustworks.com/microsoft-just-gave-up-on-the-
ki...](http://nothingjustworks.com/microsoft-just-gave-up-on-the-kinect/)

FWIW, I have the new Xbox with the Kinect and even as a Kinect fan I'm
underwhelmed. I also had to disable the voice turn on feature because when its
on, the xbox doesn't fully turn off, so a little fan runs 24/7 on the xbox
power supply and it makes just enough noise to be annoying when watching TV
and movies. In the age of silent tablets and passively cooled devices, a non-
stop hum from a fan on a media center device is inexcusable. Couldn't they
passively cooled the power supply?

~~~
VLM
"Outside of the dance games, it really never found its calling"

I'm sad to write that "just dance kids edition" equals tears during menu
navigation. Works fine during gameplay, its just the wrong UI for anything
involving menus or detail work or ... pretty much anything other than dancing.

The fundamental insight of the kinect "problem" is its a transparent interface
that people hate about 10% of the time. That sounds great, people love it 90%
of the time, right? No, because its transparent, it disappears 90% of the time
and all that remains is the boiling cauldron of hate.

As a real world insight into how much people love interfacing with electronics
using large motor movements vs pushing buttons on a box, look at how remote
controls have completely disappeared from the marketplace and everyone loves
changing channels by getting up off the couch and walking around, and its such
a great hit of exercise too. Oh wait the marketplace has gone the opposite
direction. Yeah that too.

The other part I don't like is Microsoft pays an entire army of astroturfers
who have poorly written scripts. Astroturfers should at least show some
respect, by not having poorly written scripts. If your astroturfing script
looks like a parody of customer support videos or a parody of the wikipedia
list of logical fallacies, you're just doin it wrong. Even fanboi trolls are
better than bad astroturf scripts.

~~~
nasmorn
That is because fanbois are just customers of products you don't like. Who
also cannot be bothered to shut up about said products.

------
iandanforth
To me Kinect is just a sensor, and all I want from it is data. I want it to
work on OSX or Ubuntu as easily as Windows or XBOX. That would be the only
future I'm interested in.

~~~
bignaj
Your point about OS interoperability makes sense but you should really, really
rethink the "to me kinect is just a sensor, and all I want from it is data"
part. If you've ever used a Kinect or similar device half the glory of it is
the software processing, voice recognition and face recognition etc. Sure you
could probably get just the data if you wanted, but dumbing down the device is
certainly not the future. You could have had your version of "the future" ~10
years ago -- just go buy a cheap camcorder. Perhaps you're saying you'd like
to write your own audio/video/recognition/processing algorithms for the
Kinect?

~~~
colincsl
As a robotics/computer vision researcher I disagree with you. The first Kinect
was a godsend for robotics - previously it cost thousands of dollars for
similar types of sensors. Typically we just want the raw data so that we can
do whatever processing we want. It was nice because it worked on
Mac/Linux/Windows without too much hassle. The new Kinect on the other hand is
of little use to me right now. It's locked down on Windows - and as far as I
know you need the special dev kit version for it to even work.

Also, a "cheap camcorder" is nothing compared to this. The Kinect is a 3D
sensor. You would need 2 "cheap camcorders," stereo vision algorithms/hardware
to process it in real-time, and even then the quality typically wouldn't be as
good as the Kinect.

Tangentially, it's also disheartening (at least for the time being) that Apple
recently bought Primesense - the maker of the original Kinect. Primesense was
selling a better 3D sensor for developers/researchers. Apple shut it down as
soon as they bought them.

~~~
Qworg
You're in luck - we're working on it. We've had alpha level success in
extracting depth data thus far.

[https://github.com/OpenKinect/libfreenect2](https://github.com/OpenKinect/libfreenect2)

We're always looking for more contributors!

~~~
ivoflipse
Hopefully this will also mean decent Python support, because with the Kinect
for Windows v2 dev kit I'd have to wait until wrappers became available.

The Kinect v1 was also a pain to get working on x64 Windows, so hopefully
things will be a bit easier this time around

~~~
Qworg
We like Python - we support it in libfreenect, so we'll probably have it in
libfreenect2.

------
3327
Seeing the future requires reading between the lines and imagining. If any of
you have developed with the Kinect, (i spent a year on it 2 years ago) it is
pretty impressive for a not too expensive piece of hardware.

I think MSFT is doing it right by really working on it, as we all are aware
they have had their share of flops.

Putting out a great product specially like kinect is pretty exciting. Oculus
is cool but its FB buyout puts it in a strange place and it was years out
anyway from general adoption. The kinect is much simpler and cheaper and has
already been out on the market which, gives it some validation. Plus, I am not
sure how many people will go through the trouble of putting on goggles in wide
range adoption. That being said I think simpler devices like the kinect have
more mass market appeal, and thus the adoption of devices like kinect will
ultimately be instrumental in the success of more complex interfaces like
Oculus, etc...

~~~
rtfeldman
Kinect has the bad kind of validation though: people are so disinterested in
paying for it that Microsoft has unbundled it from the XBox in an effort to
stop it from dragging down sales.

[http://www.spartanpr.com/xbox-one-kinect-u-turn-the-pr-
impac...](http://www.spartanpr.com/xbox-one-kinect-u-turn-the-pr-impact/)

~~~
gtirloni
"People" here refers more to the hardcore gamers than anything else. Regular
folks seem to love playing games designed for it.

~~~
beaumartinez
Perhaps, but are "regular folks" that inclined to buy an Xbox One just to play
a few Kinect games? Sales figures suggest not.

~~~
gtirloni
What sales figures? Xbox One without Kinect started to be sold today. I think
it's a little early to tell if Kinect was the thing holding all those sales.

If you're comparing sales figures from XboxOne (w/ Kinect) versus PS4 (w/o
Move), I think that adds too many variables to be object right now.

Let's see how this thing goes. Good thing is there is more option now. If you
don't care about Kinect, you're not forced to buy it anymore. It doesn't
change the fact it's an incredible piece of technology.

[http://news.xbox.com/2014/05/xbox-delivering-more-
choices](http://news.xbox.com/2014/05/xbox-delivering-more-choices)

 _First, beginning on June 9th, in all markets where Xbox One is sold, we will
offer Xbox One starting at $399_. This is a new console option that does not
include Kinect. _

------
unphasable
Too bad this future will be an afterthought now that the Kinect is not
included with every system. Most devs will certainly prefer the 8% increase in
processing power by disabling kinect in their game as opposed to adding a
kinect feature that only some users might be able to enjoy.

The future of kinect is now going to be carried out on PC, can't wait to see
what people cook up with the v2.

Kinect + Leap Motion + Oculus + Control VR gloves. This set up could deliver
some serious immersion, at least in the aspect of accurately bringing the
user's hands into a virtual space.

~~~
chaostheory
I thought Kinect had about 30% of an Xbox One's processing power reserved for
it?

~~~
SahAssar
I think that's for the whole OS and UI that runs constantly in the background
or on the side of the screen. The kinect only takes up part of that.

~~~
higherpurpose
The OS takes 30 percent of the processing power with a game running? That's
crazy if true. It would show how silly the whole idea of "one OS everywhere"
really is. It would be much better to have a more stripped down OS that just
does the basics and gets you inside a game, and then gets out of the way,
instead.

But this shows once again the conflictual nature of Microsoft's two strategies
with the Xbox One. It's like the gaming part is more of an afterthought, and
what they _really want_ is for Xbox to become everyone's streaming box - a
$400 streaming box.

This notion of "one OS everywhere" is what we'll get us a Windows 8
_smartwatch_ with 2GB of RAM and a Celeron processor - because who _wouldn 't_
want that?!

~~~
ekianjo
> The OS takes 30 percent of the processing power with a game running? That's
> crazy if true. It would show how silly the whole idea of "one OS everywhere"
> really is. It would be much better to have a more stripped down OS that just
> does the basics and gets you inside a game, and then gets out of the way,
> instead.

Isn't that 30% made to take care of the social features, like "sharing a clip
of the last frag I just achieved" in a FPS or something like that ? If you
want to have these advanced features, you need a number of tasks to run in the
background and I would not be surprised by the 30% CPU time.

~~~
AmVess
I don't know what the breakdown is (what number of cores goers to OS,number of
cores for the games), the the Xbox One has a rather low performance 8-core AMD
unit; the cores are provisioned amongst the OS and games as needed.

Since the CPU is low performance, the OS could easily eat 50% of its total
performance, leaving scant little for games.

~~~
ekianjo
It'd be interesting to know the figures for the PS4 - whether the OS has a
significant footprint or not when games are running. Is there any source for
the PS4 available anywhere?

------
_Adam
The Kinect has enormous potential for use in virtual reality systems. It can
significantly increase the feeling of immersion because you see in VR how your
own body is moving in the real world.

I don't know if Microsoft is exploring VR applications of the Kinect, but they
haven't really done anything with VR at all. Sony has Morpheus, but Microsoft
doesn't have anything.

They'll probably just miss out on VR like they missed out on mobile, and then
spend billions trying and failing to catch up 4 years from now...

~~~
rasz_pl
Kinect destroys immersion, skeletal tracking has ~200ms delay on Kinect One.

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danohuiginn
It was only when I opened the link that I realised how much I'd been dreading
the experience of reading it. I'd semi-consciously been expecting small-print
text surrounded by confusing navbars directing me to enterprisey product
areas.

Nice to see microsoft have a non-sucky website now.

------
rasz_pl
That sweet sweet 500ms of input LAG every time you see both player and the TV.

M$ is blowing it with Kinect One again. They are over promising, and not
delivering. We bought instant fast paced gameplay bullshit the first time with
X360. This is how first Kinect games actually worked:

[http://www.collegehumor.com/video/6348385/mega-difficult-
xbo...](http://www.collegehumor.com/video/6348385/mega-difficult-xbox-kinect-
racing-game)

or games that advertised kinect, but used only microphone lol.

And here we go again with Microsoft showing fast movements and twitch games
while technology is simply not there yet. Slow down, build from the grounds
up, slow paced uses first until you can reach 1-2 frames of delay instead of
alienating whole user base by delivering laggy shit.

