"Manufacturing of the Kinect has shut down. Originally created for the Xbox 360, Microsoft’s watershed depth camera and voice recognition microphone sold ~35 million units since its debut in 2010, but Microsoft will no longer produce it when retailers sell off their existing stock. The company will continue to support Kinect for customers on Xbox, but ongoing developer tools remain unclear.“
https://www.fastcodesign.com/90147868/exclusive-microsoft-has-stopped-manufacturing-the-kinect
Some people will point to the launch of the Xbox One as the death-knell for the Kinect. But this whole scenario is just throwing the baby out with the bath. The Kinect is not to blame for the Xbox One’s current difficulties. The moron in corporate who decided that it should be bundled with the Xbox One by default is to blame.
Also, Microsoft’s HARD shift away from internal development, and the subsequent cost to its slightly more esoteric peripheral are to blame. The Kinect wasn’t bad, and never has been bad. What it has suffered from is being under-utilized and poorly utilized. A bit more solid development for the device and they could have turned things around once the core Xbox One hardware dipped into more affordable regions.
Instead, we get this reactionary shift and abandonment of an interesting peripheral. And just when the Xbox One is starting to build up the kind of user-base that would justify its existence. Very sad, all things considered. I’m disappointed in Microsoft for lacking the foresight and spine necessary to make this work.
I’m not surprised by this, I hope it means we’ll see some real VR/AR from them soon in the console arena.
I’ve always seen the Kinect as a cheap mocap solution, and I regret that MS didn’t really focus on using it on Windows. There seems to be a lot of interest for developers side there.
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Yes, indeed. I’ve recently bought this one:
Cinema Mocap 2 - Markerless Motion Capture
and I’ve also had a chance to test this other solution (nice dev) a while ago (still want to buy it):
Does anyone know a Kinect based mocap solution that works on the Mac (without bootcamp)?
I also have the suite, but I only own the Kinect v1 (which doesn’t really have good accuracy for tracking). Did you by chance use v2? How does it compare to v1?
No, I have Kinect for Xbox 360 too.
I would have been more for it if there was more support for the productive developer side of things…with DCC software/plugins… nothing like making a home motion capture/facial setup at an affordable budget.
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Their kinect tech has gone into windows hello, which is becoming more common on laptops. As for mocap, I would not be surprised if people have systems that can do it optically now.
I still hope they will manage to get a dual Kinect 1 solution running: https://www.cinema-suite.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=41&start=25
Anyone ever tried this one? It is fun to play with and works on the Mac too: Skanect - 3D Scanning Software - Structure