Microsoft Kinect

» see xbox.com/kinect as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

kinect launched november 4 2010 as an xbox 360 add-on under the working name project natal. it was a depth camera, an rgb camera, and a microphone array fused into a sensor bar that read your skeleton in real time. the underlying structured-light technology came from primesense in israel, which microsoft licensed and apple later bought. the launch tagline was "you are the controller" and the launch demos were dance central and kinect adventures, both bundled.

it sold 8 million units in the first 60 days, which set a guinness world record for fastest-selling consumer electronics device at that point. by mid-2013 the lifetime figure was around 24 million. microsoft also shipped a windows sdk in early 2012 and the device became a research tool overnight. every robotics lab and computer-vision course suddenly had a 150-dollar depth sensor on the bench, and the literature on real-time skeleton tracking exploded.

then came the xbox one decision. the new console was announced may 2013 with kinect 2.0 in the box, mandatory, always plugged in, always listening for the wake phrase. the bundle was 100 dollars more than ps4. nsa-summer-of-snowden was the same season the box was unveiled. microsoft spent six months trying to sell an always-on camera-and-mic in the living room to a public that had just learned what backdoors were. by june 2014 they were selling a kinect-less xbox one for 399 to claw back parity with sony, and that move told developers there was no longer a reliable install base. games stopped shipping with kinect support, the sensor became a dust collector on top of the tv, and microsoft removed the dedicated port from the xbox one s in 2016. production ended october 25 2017.

i picked up a kinect for windows around 2012 because the depth sensor was the cheapest entry point into proper computer vision at the time. you could write a few hundred lines of c-sharp against the sdk and have a hand tracker working. for an engineer in ankara who would later end up doing edge cv on uavs, the kinect was a useful first piece of hardware. the games never landed for me, but the sensor on the workbench did its job until the data sheet got better elsewhere.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

the launch advertising was relentless. dance central, kinect sports, your shape fitness, kinectimals. it was sold as a family living-room product, the wii the xbox 360 had not had. it actually worked. dance central read your body well enough that the game was fun without anyone holding a controller. the limits were latency and the requirement that you stand 6 to 8 feet from the sensor in a room that was actually 6 to 8 feet wide.

the developer community on pc was bigger than the game catalog ever was. openni, libfreenect, then the official sdk in february 2012 turned the kinect into the default depth sensor for hobby robotics, gesture interfaces, art installations, and a wave of academic papers on real-time pose estimation. that side of the device's life is what kept it culturally relevant after the games dried up.

~ the actual end ~

the xbox one launch is the proximate cause but not the only cause. the deeper problem was that nobody figured out a second killer game. dance central was good. kinect sports was fine. star wars kinect existed. once the novelty wore off, sitting on the couch with a controller was still a better way to play most games. the gym-shaped exercise titles got worn-out new years gifts and then went into the cupboard.

once microsoft made kinect optional in the xbox one box in june 2014, the install base stopped being something developers could plan around. the games stopped, then the bundles stopped, then the port stopped, then the sensor stopped. october 25 2017 was a quiet press release because by then the product was already a memory.

~ what carried over ~

the technology did not die. azure kinect launched in 2019 for industrial and medical use, and was itself killed in october 2023 in favor of azure depth-sensing partners and the femto bolt sensor from orbbec. the hololens depth pipeline is downstream of kinect work too. the consumer-living-room piece is what died.

and the precedent for the xbox one launch is what microsoft really paid for. an always-on camera in your living room, sold as a bundled accessory, six months after the snowden disclosures. the company had to spend years rebuilding the xbox brand from the may-2013 reveal, and the kinect was the visible piece of that loss. the device deserved a better second act than the one it got.

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