The Future of Kinect

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/2014/jun14/06-05kinect.aspx

by ghosh • 12 years ago

96 56 12 years ago

ghshephard• 12 years ago

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?

pertinhower• 12 years ago

It seemed to me to say that the Future of Kinect is not particularly as an essential aspect a major gaming platform. "Museums, hotels, and corporate offices" seemed to figure large in its increasingly tiny future. The article seems like a bit of a swan song—maybe a consolation prize to honor all the people who worked on an ingenious but basically rejected product?

drzaiusapelord• 12 years ago

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...

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?

VLM3• 12 years ago

"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.

unphasable• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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

SahAssar• 12 years ago

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.

pja• 12 years ago

Kinect had 10% of the GPU bandwidth reserved for it: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/06/microsoft-software-upd...

Meanwhile, the OS on an Xbox One eats 3Gb of RAM, even when games are running: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/07/report-os-overhead-tak...

PS4 has a similar memory overhead for the OS.

Modern consoles are nothing like the old-school ones where once a game was running it had nigh on total control of the underlying hardware.

thefreeman2• 12 years ago

A buddy of mine is looking to work with the rift + body sensors to develop training / therapy simulations that incorporate biofeedback. They are not a gaming company so if anyone happens to be interested in something like this feel free to get in touch with them at redkiteproject.com

GFischer2• 12 years ago

I know of several companies that are already doing that, for example I know the founders of this one:

http://www.doctor-rehab.com/

They're already on clinical trials.

33272• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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...

gtirloni2• 12 years ago

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

bignaj3• 12 years ago

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...

This got me thinking a lot but I'm not sure things like Kinect will eventually help devices like the Oculus Rift. Case: my girlfriend loves the Kinect i.e. how it will turn on my TV/Xbox with voice commands, sign her in via face recognition and let her navigate to Netflix easily not even having to get out of bed or move. My girlfriend is very non-technical and doesn't care about gadgets like most of us on here do. I couldn't see my girlfriend in a million years wearing a Oculus headset and I'd never hear the end of it if she saw me wearing one...

VLM3• 12 years ago

"I couldn't see my girlfriend in a million years wearing ... and I'd never hear the end of it if she saw me wearing..."

And this is an insightful comment in that the tide seems to be turning anti-kinect, and once the "value is socially constructed by others, not internally" crowd decides as a group that the kinect is embarrassing, its toast in the marketplace unless it can downscale quickly and smoothly which most products can't do.

Occulus can survive while its in growth phase and fashion oriented people don't like it. That's OK, its a big world and there's space for all. But if the kinect org and support system and ecosystem is size "X" and "not being cool anymore" results in a mandatory nearly instant decrease in size by a factor of perhaps 3, that could kill the entire product by having trouble down scaling.

With narrow casting I'm not even sure what "cool people" watch anymore but all you need is some comedians making fun of people using Kinect or maybe some parody commercials during the superbowl or during reality TV or whatever, and that product is simply toast. Watch for that cultural phenomena, and then watch for product discontinued notices six months later.

All that product needs is a sequel of that "40 year old virgin" movie where sony pays for product placement for the main character to use a kinect, or maybe a stoner/teen comedy movie with a kinect in it, and its all over.

iandanforth2• 12 years ago

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.

bignaj3• 12 years ago

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• 12 years ago

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.

blktiger• 12 years ago

The connect is a lot more than just a cheap camcorder. It has a regular camera plus a camera for depth sensing and a microphone array (i.e. more than stereo audio).

sjtrny• 12 years ago

The software is far from perfect. From a research perspective we just want the data.

The reason why the software works so well is because it is a lot more than a colour video camera. It captures depth images too.

darksim905• 12 years ago

At the end of the day, though, all of that "software processing, voice recognition & face recognition" is just data, as iandanforth said. The Kinect just does stuff with said data :)

daenz• 12 years ago

Just to play devils advocate, you don't want just data, you want some interpretation of it as well. Kinect (at least the original, not sure about the new one) does not do on-board joint identification. You just get depth data.

You want data and the various extremely advanced interpretations of it, something that is not trivial to build on your own. So there needs to exist at least one more processing layer before you can consume it for most applications. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenNI is a good step, but until those other layers exist reliably in a stable cross-platform way, "just the data" is nearly useless.

iandanforth2• 12 years ago

This might be true for the general "you", but for me I meant what I said. I work primarily in robotics and machine learning and so the cheap, high quality camera and depth sensing is what is valuable to me. I really don't care about skeletal tracking etc.

_Adam• 12 years ago

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_pl6• 12 years ago

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

rasz_pl6• 12 years ago

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...

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.

danohuiginn• 12 years ago

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.

The Future of Kinect

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