RIP Kinect: 2010-2017(ish)

Discontinued USB adapter is the last nail in the coffin for influential tech.

Read the whole story

 

[Ogre_]

Microsoft sold the company that made the Kinetic to Apple. They made it smaller and put it on the new iPhone X. That's what they're using for facial recognition. So, with the tech being used by another company, of course Microsoft would discontinue manufacturing, etc.

Half right.

Apple bought Primesense, but Microsoft never owned them.

 

[Ogre_]

Was Microsoft just never able to address some of the problems/limitations mentioned in the article? This seems like something they should have been able to continue R&D on and get to be a fantastic piece of hardware, beyond just a gaming peripheral.

I remember thinking that the Kinect could eventually give us something like Minority Report hand control of things. That clearly never happened, but I struggle to understand the limiting factors that prevented that.

It's just the simple fact that nobody wants motion controls. I know you'll find a few odd people commenting on here that do, but the vast majority hate them. That's why it failed, and it cost Microsoft this generation in the process. Good riddance.

They are certainly not very desirable for console gaming. They might be more useful for other uses like VR, AR, or something else. Particularly as the technology matures and enables finer and finer detail.