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Comment by larrik | Hacker News Reader

This makes me sad, because my experience with my own Kinect (360) was very much a "this could be awesome if it wasn't burdened with stupid crap".

I bought it for my kids. Turns out, the Kinect is awful for kids. They were far too little for the Kinect to properly see them, and the motions to actually use it were super fussy. Then if I walked in to try to help them, the Kinect would freak out that there was a new person in view. The dog walking by would mess it up as well.

Basically, you would need a large dedicated room for the stupid thing, and you would need to be at least 8 or so to have a chance at using it properly. Then the games were meh.

But it could have been so much better.

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If you had a large enough dedicated room (I used most of a basement once, with a lot of setup work to give the Kinect the view of just about the whole room) and the right games (some games were less fiddly if multiple people/gestures were recognized that others [1]; though a lot of the management of it is still taking turns and having patience) it was sort of magic to watch particularly young kids play with the Kinect.

Especially then it seemed like a glimpse into a future of where the technology could go, and though that magic was sometimes finicky, it was still magic when it worked.

[1] Kinectimals (essentially a "cat petting" simulator) I recall particularly launching for my youngest cousins to enjoy. There were others, but that's the first to mind; this was a couple years back at a holiday party where most of this happened.

Speaking of magic, universal uses Kinect for Harry Potter in Knockturn Alley. Was surprised to see a simple Kinect running it (hard to see but it’s in a box to the left of the skeleton magic wand experience).

The Kinect has done wonders for amusement park and museum efforts. At this point I'm more surprised when those sorts of museum and amusement projects aren't using a Kinect. (...and more often than that it's simply because an old expensive system hasn't broken yet, but soon as it breaks you expect it to be replaced with a Kinect.)

For that reason, the commodification of the Kinect really has been a boon for science and entertainment. There are some commodity Kinect knock-offs out there (Intel's cameras and sensors come to mind), but selling millions of Kinects means that they will probably stay important to museum projects.

The secondary market will probably remain flooded with Kinects for a while, but maybe (hopefully) by the time it becomes hard to get a decent priced Kinect for such cool little projects there will be a Kinect 3 or similar ready. (Or Microsoft will sell the Kinect brand to a hardware manufacturer.)

I went to a few museums last week on vacation. I was surprised to see how ubiquitous the Kinect was - almost every new-ish exhibit had something interactive that made use of the Kinect. Just when I was thinking about how much fun it would be to get one to play with, they killed it :(

It will be interesting if Microsoft quietly makes a "Kinect" platform that targets businesses / museums / etc. for this exact reason. (Basically, going the Google Glass route of discontinuing a consumer "flop" that still ends up being utilized, and produced, on the B2B end).

this? https://youtu.be/uUE_DaM8ymk?t=19s

Yep, that's the one.

Kinectimals was actually well beyond the standard skeletonization system - I think they rewrote a chunk of the stack to allow for younger kids to use it and have it perform well.

I think it was more similar to how Double Fine's Happy Action Theater / Kinect Party handled the system (I recall they had some great write ups of the compromises they found), which came later than my hazy memories of my young cousins but also fit that young of an audience well. The Kinect provided a spectrum of accuracy. The most accurate skeletonizations required the most trade-offs in number of users and unobstructed views, etc, but the Kinect also provided lots of less accurate data, such as the raw depth sensing, and you didn't have to rely on just one data stream. So you might use the depth sensing alone as your primary tool, and there were enough basic gestures you can easily watch that way (like reaching in to "pet a cat" can be a very clear depth change), and use more accurate gestures and skeleton tracking for cases where you actually need more accurate gestures and/or skeleton tracking. You would use one data source to backup the other rather than only programming to the easiest/most accurate/most in-depth model.

I find Kinect programming retrospectives fascinating. Particularly that fascinating feel that with the Kinect you have so much data at your fingerprints that good Kinect programming is as much figuring out (quickly) which data to ignore as which data to use, but also realizing that you don't have to trust just one source of the data you want a gestalt of it. (...and getting a good gestalt to be performant in real time is certainly a challenge.)

> I bought it for my kids. Turns out, the Kinect is awful for kids.

What's sad is that it could have been great, if MS just put a little more dedication and effort towards it. The Kinect Sesame Street games had so much potential. Hopefully another company can do better. Could be wrong but I think Apple bought the company behind the original Kinect's technology

I believe they did, but they miniaturized it and are using it for their face recognition technology in the iPhone X to unlock the phone.

My 2-3 year old kids love the Kinect on the xbone. Well, the love Fruit Ninja on there and have zero problems with it despite their stature. They've played the game weekly for a couple years now.

I just point the Kinect down a little for them (and play on my knees if I join them) and sometimes move one sofa back a couple feet if more than one person is playing at a time.

The improvements in the xbone over 360 in the Kinect department were huge.

I kept waiting for another game in the vein of Fruit Ninja, but none came.

Also use the Kinect for voice controls on movies. It was the equivalent of the Echo but well ahead of time.

I had hopes for the xbone kinect, but they seemed to stop making games for it when they unbundled it (which was before I bought into it).

Microsoft could have taken the outcry about the bundling 2 ways:

1) Make the Kinect awesome with awesome software, and make those people wish they had gotten it bundled.

2) Fall on their sword and assume that when people don't want to be _forced_ into something is also means that they don't want to choose it ever.

They obviously chose option 2, but I think option 1 would have served them better.

Could've been (so much) better, had it not been for the agenda.

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