Feel like the overpriced PC adapter really killed off what could have been a thriving scene for the second Kinect. Amazing piece of tech for its time.
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).
I chased a Kinect v2 for PC, but the driver story on linux isn't great (since it never hit that broad distribution). Well, that was a few years ago, it may have improved since then.
I think it's in a similar situation to gimmicks that Nintendo sometimes puts into their systems. Most games are cross-platform. They aren't gonna change the game fundamentally to take advantage of the different input mechanism. If your system relies on it, chances are you might not get a port. That's why almost all games that take advantage of these features are first party. The few that aren't are usually shovelware or if you are lucky 1-2 cool indie games.
Same! I believe it's like VR: the lack of real commitment from the companies making them, which doesn't foster a community of creators will always be the death of any new technology.
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.
The terrifying thing about Meta (and their large, connected world) is that, if you look at someone the wrong way and get reported, you lose access to all your games. Even single-player ones! It’s too dangerous to open, let alone engage with.
> I think VR's issue is that most people don't want to strap things to their face.
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.
it's literally game changing for flight simulators, especially dogfight simulators. Being able to very easily swivel your head to keep a target in your sightline is amazing. I put a ton of hours into Elite Dangerous that I wouldn't have otherwise.
> While I don't disagree with your point, I think VR's issue is that most people don't want to strap things to their face.
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).
Have you tried current gen VR? Honestly, the experience of playing VR Ping pong is SO much like the real thing on the Quest 3. Synth riders is also fantastic. But the best experiences don't really fit into the "video game" box imho; it's closer to buying roller blades / skates or ski equipment.
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.
VR is IMO the evolution of systems like the Kinect, but that aside, the various companies that made VR sets have spent billions developing the technology and I'm confident they are offering (game) developers money to make VR versions of their games or new IPs targeting VR; I think at this point every major developer and publisher has done one or more VR titles, be they exclusives or VR versions of games (like Skyrim VR).
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)
The Wii was one of the most successful consoles of all time. Half the games had people standing up and swinging at something. That doesn't track at all.
Let's stack up all PC games and all console games and let's see which ones involve physical movement and then see how long people stick with those games. Do you know any gamers? I do. They don't want to move.
I think that was purely from the novelty factor and because it initially attracted a lot of people who weren't into gaming. Past the first few funny weeks when people would let visitors try wii sports and have a few laughs, the thing ended up collecting dust in most households with no kids.
The main problem for Nintendo was that countless Wii buyers never moved beyond Wii Sports and maybe Mario Kart. Despite having over 100 million units sold, staple franchises sold pretty badly compared to the Switch.
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.
We’ve had widespread videogames for like a generation and a half or so, it is early to say there’s anything fundamental in our culture about them. If good VR were to come out, there’s every chance it could go in direction more like sport than game.
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.
They really tried for a while with the bundling the second version with the XBox One but that didn't last more than a year so it wasn't long enough to really saturate the market which is what odd peripherals REALLY need to get people to make games for them. They either have to be very very cheap or wide spread for it to make sense to make a game that requires them.
They are still in use at some museum in the Netherlands. Probably connected to some Windows computer. I wonder how long they will keep working, given driver support.
I love my Xbox Kinnects (Dance Central >>> Just Dance), but the current state of AI-enhanced motion capture is amazing.
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
I worked on the VFX of a movie in 2012 where we actually used a Kinect as a cheap Lidar replacement for mapping set geometry. Such a useful little device.
I wonder why the Kinect is still so popular given the many more recent projects that have come to market, eg Realsense, Zed, Orbec.
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.
I went to a CeX recently and they have a bunch of Xbox 360 Kinects laying around for 8 euros. Even my hometown which doesn't have a lot of tech stores, has Xbox 360 Kinects laying around at some mall shops for pretty cheap. I can go out and buy one today for cheaper than a meal out, and make use of the wide software made for it by the Kinect community, and I know exactly what to expect in terms of its capabilities. Same can't be said for any of the other sensors, which are also low enough volume that if they get discontinued you'll probably have an even harder time sourcing them than a 360 Kinect discontinued 10 years ago
Xbox 360's were The Original Netflix Machine of that 2008-2012 range. Sure maybe Wii's sold more but they only effectively played Wii Sports and didn't support Full HD. Sure PS3's had blu-ray drives in them but people were beginning to stop caring about physical media. The most popular "game" in terms of hours played on the 360 was the Netflix App.
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.
Our problem is support for the products. If you are deploying these you are probably in the same boat where you only do about 200-300 a year and since you are small potatoes you get no support. Though we are not looking to move back to Kinect for the same reason we are looking to get off these sensors to some thing that can be supported.
Price, drivers and/or recognizability? There's a reason that the usually technically inferior Raspberry PI still probably outsells all the bananas,etc.
This reminds me of the 360 live stream camera by Microsoft Research which also died. Not many products made by Microsoft Research seems to ever be commercially fruitful.
And yet, a lot are well received. People still miss the Zune and are disappointed that Microsoft didn't continue with it.
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.
Anyone has an interesting project to build with Kinect? I have a 360 kinect laying around, since nobody does Just Dance parties anymore. Also, was the XBone version of kinect much better than 360?
There was something unsatisfactory to V1 users in the V2 system. Depth was jittery or whatever it had been.
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 with the v2, from someone who had a boss that loved the kinect and used it in retail environments experimentally wasn't the new tech. The new tech was/is amazing. The level of detail you can get from the v2 dwarfs the v1 on every axis.
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'.
The problem with the original Kinect (v1) is that good tracking software for it was never really written. Most application that support it, just use the original Microsoft SDK to do the motion tracking, and it's just not very good, the main issue is that it always assume that the tracked person is directly facing the camera, and is very bad at dealing with occlusion. The good thing about it, is that it ran in real-time on a potato.
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.
Feel like the overpriced PC adapter really killed off what could have been a thriving scene for the second Kinect. Amazing piece of tech for its time.
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).
I chased a Kinect v2 for PC, but the driver story on linux isn't great (since it never hit that broad distribution). Well, that was a few years ago, it may have improved since then.
https://github.com/OpenKinect/libfreenect2
Yep. Last commit 5 years ago, not included by default on distro's or kernels, build-from-source-and-hope... ;-)
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.
sure if you like 90s webcam resolutions I guess.
I was one of those people that thought FOR SURE that the Kinect was going to change everything. I still have fond memories of playing with it.
I think it's in a similar situation to gimmicks that Nintendo sometimes puts into their systems. Most games are cross-platform. They aren't gonna change the game fundamentally to take advantage of the different input mechanism. If your system relies on it, chances are you might not get a port. That's why almost all games that take advantage of these features are first party. The few that aren't are usually shovelware or if you are lucky 1-2 cool indie games.
Same! I believe it's like VR: the lack of real commitment from the companies making them, which doesn't foster a community of creators will always be the death of any new technology.
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.
The terrifying thing about Meta (and their large, connected world) is that, if you look at someone the wrong way and get reported, you lose access to all your games. Even single-player ones! It’s too dangerous to open, let alone engage with.
While I don't disagree with your point, I think VR's issue is that most people don't want to strap things to their face.
More physically engaging video games definitely seemed to have some interest, though, starting with the Wii.
> I think VR's issue is that most people don't want to strap things to their face.
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.
it's literally game changing for flight simulators, especially dogfight simulators. Being able to very easily swivel your head to keep a target in your sightline is amazing. I put a ton of hours into Elite Dangerous that I wouldn't have otherwise.
> While I don't disagree with your point, I think VR's issue is that most people don't want to strap things to their face.
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).
Have you tried current gen VR? Honestly, the experience of playing VR Ping pong is SO much like the real thing on the Quest 3. Synth riders is also fantastic. But the best experiences don't really fit into the "video game" box imho; it's closer to buying roller blades / skates or ski equipment.
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.
VR is IMO the evolution of systems like the Kinect, but that aside, the various companies that made VR sets have spent billions developing the technology and I'm confident they are offering (game) developers money to make VR versions of their games or new IPs targeting VR; I think at this point every major developer and publisher has done one or more VR titles, be they exclusives or VR versions of games (like Skyrim VR).
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)
Eh, fundamentally when people game they don't want to move. In the west the culture of leisure, particularly entertainment leisure, is sedentary.
The Wii was one of the most successful consoles of all time. Half the games had people standing up and swinging at something. That doesn't track at all.
Let's stack up all PC games and all console games and let's see which ones involve physical movement and then see how long people stick with those games. Do you know any gamers? I do. They don't want to move.
I think that was purely from the novelty factor and because it initially attracted a lot of people who weren't into gaming. Past the first few funny weeks when people would let visitors try wii sports and have a few laughs, the thing ended up collecting dust in most households with no kids.
Wii Sports 2 sold 30M units, 3 years post launch. That’s top 30 for all platforms all time.
Even 5 years post launch Just Dance 3 sold 10M units.
Just dance is for young children playing with their friends. That is not the core gaming market.
The main problem for Nintendo was that countless Wii buyers never moved beyond Wii Sports and maybe Mario Kart. Despite having over 100 million units sold, staple franchises sold pretty badly compared to the Switch.
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 Wii was also extremely easily hackable. Everybody I knew in college were pirating Wii games.
You know that the wiimotes have IMUs in them and motion games are still a thing on that platform, right?
The thing that really made the switch sell was it's portability.
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We’ve had widespread videogames for like a generation and a half or so, it is early to say there’s anything fundamental in our culture about them. If good VR were to come out, there’s every chance it could go in direction more like sport than game.
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.
Exactly, the point of egaming is to not move your fat ass. Otherwise you would be doing sports, most of them being just games.
They really tried for a while with the bundling the second version with the XBox One but that didn't last more than a year so it wasn't long enough to really saturate the market which is what odd peripherals REALLY need to get people to make games for them. They either have to be very very cheap or wide spread for it to make sense to make a game that requires them.
They are still in use at some museum in the Netherlands. Probably connected to some Windows computer. I wonder how long they will keep working, given driver support.
I love my Xbox Kinnects (Dance Central >>> Just Dance), but the current state of AI-enhanced motion capture is amazing.
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
It's still getting a second life in Touchdesigner / music audiovisual projects.
I worked on the VFX of a movie in 2012 where we actually used a Kinect as a cheap Lidar replacement for mapping set geometry. Such a useful little device.
I wonder why the Kinect is still so popular given the many more recent projects that have come to market, eg Realsense, Zed, Orbec.
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.
I went to a CeX recently and they have a bunch of Xbox 360 Kinects laying around for 8 euros. Even my hometown which doesn't have a lot of tech stores, has Xbox 360 Kinects laying around at some mall shops for pretty cheap. I can go out and buy one today for cheaper than a meal out, and make use of the wide software made for it by the Kinect community, and I know exactly what to expect in terms of its capabilities. Same can't be said for any of the other sensors, which are also low enough volume that if they get discontinued you'll probably have an even harder time sourcing them than a 360 Kinect discontinued 10 years ago
Because of volume, it was very widely available, it was pretty cheap too on the second hand market.
Xbox 360's were The Original Netflix Machine of that 2008-2012 range. Sure maybe Wii's sold more but they only effectively played Wii Sports and didn't support Full HD. Sure PS3's had blu-ray drives in them but people were beginning to stop caring about physical media. The most popular "game" in terms of hours played on the 360 was the Netflix App.
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.
Our problem is support for the products. If you are deploying these you are probably in the same boat where you only do about 200-300 a year and since you are small potatoes you get no support. Though we are not looking to move back to Kinect for the same reason we are looking to get off these sensors to some thing that can be supported.
Price, drivers and/or recognizability? There's a reason that the usually technically inferior Raspberry PI still probably outsells all the bananas,etc.
probably price? They are generally in 5x to 10x price range. You can buy tons of kinect with price of one of those.
I think you may be right. I just looked up Kinect on eBay and you can get one for twenty bucks.
This reminds me of the 360 live stream camera by Microsoft Research which also died. Not many products made by Microsoft Research seems to ever be commercially fruitful.
They were too early to deploy the technology. LiDAR is common on smartphones now. On iPhones you can capture the back of the phone’s LiDaR data .
Apple bought the company (primesense) that made the kinect 1.
And yet, a lot are well received. People still miss the Zune and are disappointed that Microsoft didn't continue with it.
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.
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Anyone has an interesting project to build with Kinect? I have a 360 kinect laying around, since nobody does Just Dance parties anymore. Also, was the XBone version of kinect much better than 360?
In academia it's often used as a cheap environment scanner, accessibility studies for people with limited mobility, etc.
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 one is better for 3d scanning. Xbox one version is better for object tracking.
Isn't this just because there was nowhere near as much software for 3d scanning made for v2?
There was something unsatisfactory to V1 users in the V2 system. Depth was jittery or whatever it had been.
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 with the v2, from someone who had a boss that loved the kinect and used it in retail environments experimentally wasn't the new tech. The new tech was/is amazing. The level of detail you can get from the v2 dwarfs the v1 on every axis.
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.
Interesting stuff, thanks for the clarification!
Did MS provide SDKs for other OSes for v1 or was it just easier for people to make an open source one?
primesense made them, the guys who sold the sensor to microsoft.
The problem with the original Kinect (v1) is that good tracking software for it was never really written. Most application that support it, just use the original Microsoft SDK to do the motion tracking, and it's just not very good, the main issue is that it always assume that the tracked person is directly facing the camera, and is very bad at dealing with occlusion. The good thing about it, is that it ran in real-time on a potato.
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.
There might be some work at https://k2vr.tech regarding this it seems like.
the Kinect One is better in a bunch of ways (field of view, resolution) but a big one for certain use-cases is that it can fully track 6 skeletons.
The 360 Kinect can only track two skeletons (but differentiate 6).
Source on that tracking 6 skeletons? That's cool.
If you would like to venture into generative/interactive visuals there are libraries for TouchDesigner which uses the Kinect.
An example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDZoOnzLYGo