The weird afterlife of Xbox Kinect
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
If you have a semi decent soldering iron it's very easy to make a DIY pc adapter btw. The 36w power requirement is very easily managed now with most GaN chargers too (12v3a).
The kinect1 appears to be "OOTB-ish" at least on ubuntu: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libfreenect
...so just an advisory that for casual purposes a Kinect1 is going to be better than a Kinect2.
Same applies to wearables (barely alive thanks to a few specific use cases and Apple).
It's like someone thinks they can create a TV, just let it be and it will develop into something bigger. Sometimes that's the case and sometimes you've got to fully be behind it.
Smash Bros Brawl? 13 million sales. Smash Bros Ultimate? 35 million.
Animal Crossing City Folk? 3 million. Animal Crossing New Horizons? 47 million.
Mario Party 8? 9 million. Super Mario Party? 21 million.
Zelda Twilight Princess? 8 million. Zelda Breath of the Wild? 34 million.
Basically, the Switch has 50% more units in the world, but you can tack on 200%-400% more sales per franchise entry in general; and some extreme breakouts. For this reason alone, Nintendo is never returning to Wii-era gimmicks, and we’ll probably never see “Nintendo Selects” again.
The thing that really made the switch sell was it's portability.
Even 5 years post launch Just Dance 3 sold 10M units.
'Gamers don't want to move', is just nerd bashing. It's 2025, even amongst hardcore D&D playing, JRPG stanning, con attending 'weeb' adjacent ubernerds, fitness is in. Sure Americans, and increasingly Europeans are tending toward obesity, but suggesting thats a characteristic of 'gamers' as a class is just factually incorrect.
But “good VR” is this sense is really very far off. Like actually judging the devices as things you might want to use, instead of with the engineer’s perspective (yea we’re all very impressed by what Oculus pulled off with the limited tech of our day, but the devices actually kinda suck if you don’t grade them on that curve).
They need to be as easy to put on as sunglasses, need to be able to just pop them on without pre-analyzing your space, there needs to be good force-feedback (you can’t have a satisfying sword fight in VR). This isn’t possible yet, of course, so it continues to be niche.
Otherwise gamers could as well be watching TV.
More physically engaging video games definitely seemed to have some interest, though, starting with the Wii.
It's the whole package, not just one factor. Motion sickness, strapping something to your face, requirement for "free space" to move around and exercise of being up for an extended period of time.
Playing a shooter in VR is genuinely one of my favorite experience, it feels tactical, you have to crouch, reload, you hear the bullets wishling close to your ears, etc... but it's also an experience that is kept to the odd weekend, every once in a while, because it genuinely feels like work to setup everything.
I'd go the opposite way. The problem with current VR is it is just some goggles. What you really want is a full exoskeleton to capture all your movement and add some force feedback. Put it on servos so you can add a little free fall here and there, some fans around to get the feeling of wind. Yeah it would not be cheap (at least at first).
I was also surprised at how much mixed-reality made a difference for me personally. I'm much more likely to strap the thing to my head when I can have awareness of what's happening in the physical world.
But even then, VR never became the runaway success that they were hoping for. I think, anyway. Same with Apple Vision, it went real quiet around that after the initial release.
Looking around my neck of the woods (the Netherlands), VR / AR is basically nonexistent. You'd expect VR and VR titles to have their own section in gaming stores... no such luck. (mind you / caveat, we don't actually have many gaming stores like that)
In addition to Google MediaPipe, I just learned about MoCapade 3 that captures multiple people from any video (e.g. any camera): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jizULlZTAR8
Can you learn to dance well from those games? I've overlooked them as girl games and Wii JD was meh. If it's good on Kinect I may as well learn something. Gathering dust.
I’ve recently been using the Realsense for robotics and they are satisfactory (although they have been drastically increasing in price for unclear reasons). I wouldn’t use Kinect because they are no longer being officially manufactured.
So because of that, I'm not surprised that casual audience also got a Kinect at some point too. Because of the Netflix app, you always had your 360 plugged into your TV.
“The weird afterlife of Kinect” is that it became FaceID and is on hundreds of millions of beloved devices. By that metric the Kinect is a ridiculous success as a hardware innovation.
Strange that it wasn’t mentioned.
But then, the dedicated music player industry pretty much died when smartphones became a thing. There was Windows Mobile for a while which also did some interesting innovations (I was impressed by the animations) but which probably did not meet expectations. A shame, it was probably the strongest contender for a 3rd party in the mobile OS ecosystem. Various other phone manufacturers built their own OS but ultimately conceded that it's a big effort.
Still no finger tracking, but at least it can see your legs and arms move normally.
V1 was based on an Israeli structured light tech that later became Apple TrueDepth, a static dot pattern taken with a camera which deviations becomes depth. V2 was technically an early and alternative implementation of Time-of-Flight LIDAR based on a light phase delaying device, that output deviations from set known distance as pictures or something along that.
There wouldn't have been lacking app support issues if V2 did work. There was/were something that made users be "yeah... by the way" about it.
The problem was that it ONLY had a windows SDK and most of the people who did amazing work outside of games and the xbox with the kinect v1 were using it with macs and linux in tools like openframeworks and processing. The v1 was developed outside microsoft and primesense and there were SDKs that were compatible cross platform. Tons of artists dove right in.
The KinectV2 only offered a windows sdk, and that's what killed it in the 'secondary market'.
Luckily now we have libfreenect2 (https://github.com/OpenKinect/libfreenect2) but that came too late for most of us.
Did MS provide SDKs for other OSes for v1 or was it just easier for people to make an open source one?
An example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDZoOnzLYGo
I worked on a few projects where the Kinect was mounted on a self-driving robot for 3D mapping of areas unaccessible to humans.
Also worked in using it in applications with people with Alzheimer's.
The issue is very often lack of or outdated SDKs for the target platform. The hardware could be better but it's already getting many project to 90%.
The 360 Kinect can only track two skeletons (but differentiate 6).
In order to get a good result, someone would need to train a good model for HPE that could use the cloud point data directly, but it seems nobody cares about depth sensor anymore, most efforts are going to HPE from regular 2d video (like media pipe holistic model). And given the result you can get with media pipe, openpose and the likes, it's understandable nobody is bothering working with low resolution cloud point anymore for 3D HPE.
The only use-case I can think of for a Kinect v1 in 2025, would be robotics if you want a low latency low resolution cloud point for your robot control, but even there I think we are moving to big vision model capable of making sense of regular video feeds.