Microsoft retires Kinect camera
Oct 27, 2017 by CGPress Staff
5
|
According to an article on co.design Microsoft is officially ceasing production of the Kinect camera. Originally released as a gaming gadget, the Kinect’s combination of real time depth, colour and audio sensing equipment meant that it found a place in the armoury of many 3D and installation artists as an inexpensive motion capture and scanning device. It is thought that Microsoft will continue to provide support for current users, but the device will no longer ship once current stocks are depleted. Read the full story on co.design.
Too bad, really. For me, Kinect/Primesense was a pretty revolutionary device. Fairly good depth data at a very cheap price, which I would say is still unmatched.
Thanks to Apple for killing yet another great product.
Not sure what Apple has to do with this….It’s a Microsoft product, not an Apple..
Primesense, the Isreali company that developed the actual depth sensor that went into Kinect 1 (aka “Kinect for Xbox 360”), was acquired by Apple a few years ago. Since then, Microsoft switched to a different sensor for Kinect 2 which is time-of-flight based. Bigger, more expensive, less compatible, but not really with better depth data (color camera was higher res).
Kinect 1 was the ‘fastest-selling device on record’ back then, with more than 10 million Kinect systems sold in the first six months, and its performance surpassed almost everything else on the market (even much more expensive solutions) for markerless, untrained, uncalibrated full-body capture.
M refers that primesense was bought by apple. But I think there is no relation in to the decision by microsoft to kill Kinect. I think Kinect was awesome and not totally reached his potential, no on xbox but by all makers comunity. Having a cheap device to track in 3d motion was good.
Now you have a “small kinect” on IphoneX, for “only” 4X times more the cost of the kinect2.
And I just bought Kinectimals for my daughter two days ago, really is\was a great piece of technology, I’m happy I got to experience it.