So, the Kinect got a last minute change from corporate MS that completely ruined the device.
The Kinect SDK is insanely fast, accurate, and fun to use. This is because all of the processing for the IR and depth sensors/etc. was done on the physical Kinect device itself. it has its own processor to handle all of that. And it was lightning fast for what it needed to be. Imagine a kinect that instantly tracks your movements with sub-ms latency/lag. That’s what the Kinect was supposed to be, and the SDK version of it was.
When they made the production/commercial version of it, someone high up without understanding the product thought that people would be able to hack into the Kinect and exploit it to steal MS’s trade secrets and code for how it works if they could get access to the onboard CPU and memory of the device.
So they moved the processing for all the sensors into the XBox mainboard/CPU. This was further limited by a paltry amount of CPU/RAM given to any peripheral device so the rest could remain reserved for the game itself.
This completely ruined the device. It couldn’t help but be laggy as fuck. it barely had any processing/compute time to handle the sensor data in a timely fashion.
Once again proving that corporate MBA fucks don’t know what they’re doing and shouldn’t ever be allowed to tell engineers what to do or how to do it.
Edit: Developed a few custom games and products with the Kinect SDK over Unity3D and it was blazingly fast. This is how I know all this after doing some digging/research as to why the SDK experience was so wildly different from the commercial version.
I was in the industry for nearly a decade and have witnessed so many similar situations. Hadn’t heard about this one though, thanks for sharing. I was around in those days and was super excited about the Kinect but we didn’t make anything in house with it so I never got the opportunity to see it function properly.
It’s one of the reasons Lionhead had to cancel the “Milo” game they showed off with the Kinect announcement. Without the on-board processing, the stuff they had already built couldn’t run.
I always thought that the Kinect was great , extremely fun , with a few limited games
The wii was great too , a bit “clunky” ,
But from the get go the proposition isnt as universal as playing a game the normal way ,
I adored the Wii, it had all the charm of a new nintendo system, but was also basically a Gamecube, it was, for a short time, the perfect game system.
I only wish I wasn’t struggling with the destruction of my life and family when it was in its heyday.
Sorry to hear. Sounds intense.
We have the original Kinect and an old Xbox 360 permanently stationed in the living room of the house.
Being able to have Kinect Party or its prequel (Double Fine’s Happy Action Theater) on the TV out there is absolute magic when you need to entertain a group of kids.
They should’ve stuck it out with it included in the xbone. Offering a cheaper version without one split the playerbase and made development of any kinect features in Xbox exclusives infeasible.
That and the one thing I thought was awesome - split screen TV so I could play a game and have a live football match or something on part of the screen. That was amazing at the time, I was gutted when they killed it off to get more resources for games.
How did this work through the Xbox? I know a lot of newer TVs can do this but did you have to route your tv cable through the Xbox to get it to work that way?
Exactly that. The Xbox One came with HDMI in and HDMI out.
Lol PIP has been a thing since the mid 90’s
That’s kind of my point, why would you need that functionality in a console if your tv can already do it. Plus having to keep your cable box or whatever plugged into the console so it has to be on all the time.
That was part of Microsoft’s pitch - they wanted it to be the central device. I was in the minority that thought it was a great idea at the time, but then I’d been running a dedicated Windows Media Center PC under the TV for years until that point, so to me it was a shinier upgrade.
That makes sense. These days it sounds like a much better proposition to people, hell my wife and I recently built a batocera pi that she wanted for retro gaming, but I wanted as a TV box for kodi and jellyfin once I get it working. And that use case is the one that makes the steam box sound tempting.
Funny enough, while I’d taken issue with that aspect of the xbone, I’d fairly quickly started using my 360 thst way.
We could’ve had finger tracking by now instead of thumbsticks that break frequently.
This incident made his decision to euthanise his wife far more easier
I don’t know, I always found it pretty fun on my Xbox 360.
The game where you patch the water
playing skyrim with kinect was genuinely the best way to play the game
Nah I loved it. Was great for watching videos
Wdym it was awesome
The Kinect is impressive for how high tech it is.
The Wiimote and sensor bar is impressive for how low tech it is.
PlayStation Move existed.
To be fair, the six-axis movement of the Move controllers was obviously impressive and a seemed to be a precursor to almost all VR controllers.
Actually it is fantastic for 3D scanning: cheap and does the trick. If you want to gift me one, feel free.
I have one but never used it for anything beyond the funky depth-camera visuals - how do you use it for 3d scanning?
I feel it is well explained here: https://all3dp.com/2/kinect-3d-scanner-easy-beginner-tutorial/
I’m sure at the 3d printing community they can provide a better guide though.
But the guist of it is having a 3d scanner allows you to scan an object that then later you can print (with some editing). This is fantastic for making that broken plastic piece of a machine that otherwise would be working.
This must be a meme from deep down the nostalgia box
