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posted by martyb on Thursday October 26 2017, @09:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the pining-for-the-fjords dept.

Microsoft kills off Kinect, stops manufacturing it

Microsoft is finally admitting Kinect is truly dead. After years of debate over whether Kinect is truly dead or not, the software giant has now stopped manufacturing the accessory. Fast Co Design reports that the depth camera and microphone accessory has sold around 35 million units since its debut in November, 2010. Microsoft's Kinect for Xbox 360 even became the fastest-selling consumer device back in 2011, winning recognition from Guinness World Records at the time.

In the years since its debut on Xbox 360, a community built up around Microsoft's Kinect. It was popular among hackers looking to create experiences that tracked body movement and sensed depth. Microsoft even tried to bring Kinect even more mainstream with the Xbox One, but the pricing and features failed to live up to expectations. Microsoft was then forced to unbundle Kinect from Xbox One, and produced an unsightly accessory to attach the Kinect to the Xbox One S. After early promise, Kinect picked up a bad name for itself.

Kinect technology lives on in products such as HoloLens, Windows Hello cameras, and "Mixed Reality" headsets.


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Thursday October 26 2017, @02:44PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Thursday October 26 2017, @02:44PM (#587830)

    Cautious agreement, although there are barrier to entry issues between "insert this dance disk in your brothers xbox360" vs all the fooling around to dance without a kinect.

    One interesting problem with dance games as a genre in the long term anyway, is I've seen my daughter and her friends dance while watching "lets play" youtube videos on the TV ... its a category that relies on grandma and auntie looking for christmas gifts because the kids think its just as much fun to watch the videos and the youtube UI is less of a hassle than the xbox UI. The testosterone fueled requirement of online competitive scoreboards to play gamer-style primate dominance games might be required for teen boys, but doesn't sell well to teen girls. So the problem is selling Grandma and Auntie on fifteen minutes of attaching the floozle to the encabulator to do it the "right" way none of which they can do by themselves vs "Oh forget it lets dance along to the lets play videos on youtube". The programmers think dance games fun comes from the feedback using expensive specialized now discontinued hardware that the girls are ironically uninterested in.

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