All the money in the world couldn’t make Kinect happen
polygon.com
polygon.com
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.
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.
So while individual consoles can be market successes or failures in their day, the ideas introduced by various consoles are much harder to score.
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.
Maybe we’ll see it next year with the next gen.
Microsoft eventually dropped the Kinect and the price and sales of the Xbox picked up considerably.
RDR2’s performance/resolution is particularly brutal on XB1 judging by the Digital Foundry video that compares all the systems.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This infuriates me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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).
See https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/39181...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Real dancing meanwhile is even better. I will never buy Kinect for dancing again :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's really that simple.
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.
There are all sorts of games that give you a full body aerobic workout like Beat Saber, Dance Central, and various boxing games.
Honestly, just playing VR games of any sort that involve standing is a workout, I've found. Even zombie shooter games!
Wii sports would have failed on Xbox, and Kinect adventures would have worked well enough on the Wii.
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.
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.
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.
The technology is there.