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.
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.
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.
I guess it's because Xbox had a big hardcore gaming base as oppose to Nintendo, and motion sensing at the level of resolution it is at, is really only capable of casual gameplay. The tech needs to go to the next level, especially in terms of reliability so that hardcore gamers can feel as though they need lots of time to master it.
Makes me wonder if Nintendo had gotten the tech what they would have done with it. Nintendo not only has the more casual audience, but they have the creativity and culture internally to develop compelling gaming experiences with unique technology like that.
They tried it twice, it didn't take off and realistically it never would.
Unless all consoles/pc supported some kind of similar functionality most developers will ignore it because it's just more work for one console that won't actually sell anymore copies.
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 discussions with parents who are absolutely OK with their kids playing games 'controllerless' but against the idea of their young kids using gaming consoles (couch zombie with controller/other input device). Kinect has physical movement and allows for young children to have fun before they can develop any competent skill or understanding using a controller - this disrupts a common bias parents have against their young kids playing a videogame. Missed opportunity.
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 exists...
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.
Nintendo integrated some ideas from the Wii into the Switch though, and the whole console market expects to constantly move on to new platforms and new generations of technology.
So while individual consoles can be market successes or failures in their day, the ideas introduced by various consoles are much harder to score.
Didn't catch on? The Wii was Nintendo's best selling console ever (apart from the original Gameboy), and outsold the PS3 from the same generation (and ever Xbox ever). It's quite likely that the Wii is the reason why PS3 was Sony's lowest selling console.
Yeah it didn't catch on. The Wii U bombed, Kinect on xbox bombed and the actual number of games that took advantage of the features in either was pretty low compared to the total games released in those generations.
Wii/kinect is a gimmick that a finite number of good games could take advantage of and once they'd been released there wasn't really anywhere else to go.
They blew it by not listening to hardcore gamers in the first place. By forcing the technology (and still unreasonably high price tag) onto gamers who didn't want it they created a huge backlash. If they'd sold it separately and innovated over time, slowly convincing the gamers who weren't initially interested, eventually they might have gotten somewhere.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The "always on" thing was especially bad. They announced that around the same time as them forbidding used game sales and it created some pretty intensely negative reactions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Not really, depends on the age of the children, by age 5 they are likely to become very good a the games. Speaking from experience, my young children play Wii Sports games.
You could argue that no gaming at all is the best option. Maybe, that's a separate discussion. Given the choice between "classic" gaming and motion controllers, the Wii model wins by a huge margin. It cannot compare, the parent comment describes the benefits really well.
There is something to your point about post-game hyperactivity, but that can be dampened with some parental intervention. The same behavior can be observed after sugary drinks, vigorous play...
> There is something to your point about post-game hyperactivity, but that can be dampened with some parental intervention. The same behavior can be observed after sugary drinks, vigorous play.
Yes, but parent will still dislike the need for that "parental intervention" that did not had to be. Plus, younger sibling or friend or other relative do not deserve to be on receiving end of that behavior.
When I see my kids to turn into little assholes after sugary drinks, I would have limited or stopped them entirely too. Or be like "no the issue with sugary drink is not that they dont get exercise, it is how they act". (My kids dont have that issue with sugary drinks).
The sugary drinks making kids hyperactive thing is a myth, and it is largely caused by parental perception, excitement from getting a treat, and the environment kids tend to be in when they are given a lot of sugar (parties, etc.)
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' :)
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.
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.
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.
Actually, this issue is worst with video games then say lego or toy cars or dolls. The off-tablet activities seems to be easier to stop for kids and definitely less addictive. Kids are also calmer after stopping them (less likely to take frustration on siblings, less irritable).The selfish advantage of video games is that kids stick to them longer then with other activities, so the parent has more of uninterupted time.
tl;dr: kids behavior changes depending on which activity they do or did last hour
I mean, seriously, it is the similar with adults. Gamer after long session is more irritable, still frustrated from looses and not exactly pleasant to be around.
But you can't compare lego and playing Wii tennis, one is a competitive game, the other is coop. Imagine kids outside playing some competitive kids games and playing Wii, that is more fair comparison. Both will induce similar behavior in kids, at least mine: sometimes getting angry or crying if they're not the best, taking a ball and not wanting to share with others, etc. At some age all kids do that and then they slowly learn to control it better. Of course, going outside and playing with other kids is the best, but sometimes they can't do it and then I see Wii as much better substitute than classic video games or lego or whatever (don't get me wrong, legos are great, just not for the same reasons)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Switch controllers have an infrared depth tracking sensor, which has some neat uses in Nintendo Labo. But like the WiiMote, I don't expect many games to take advantage of it.
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.
> 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.
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.
A Wii without Wiimote is basically a Gamecube. Even as a Nintendo fan who absolutely hate Wiimote, you gotta recognise it, especially when playing with non-gamer. Casual are enjoying playing it with Wiimote, and it became a reason for those people to buy it.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I loved the XBox Fitness app. The gamification really gave me an incentive to be doing the moves correctly and trying to crush the high scores of friends.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’d that doable? Is there a proof-of-concept? It would be an incredible interface, even if it just recognized some basic hand gestures using a bracelet.
