Microsoft has officially confirmed that it has killed off the Kinect and stopped manufacturing it. The Microsoft Kinect is a watershed depth camera and voice recognition microphone accessory which was originally created for the Xbox 360 back in November 2010.
Microsoft has sold close to 35 million units of Kinect since its debut, and the accessory went on to become the fastest-selling consumer device back in 2011 and even won found a place in the Guinness World Records back in the day. Alex Kipman, creator of the Kinect, and Matthew Lapsen, GM of Xbox Devices Marketing in an exclusive interview with Fast Co Design has confirmed that Microsoft will no longer manufacture the Kinect devices once the retailers sell off their existing stock.
Microsoft will continue to support Kinect for Xbox customers, but ongoing developer tools remain unclear. Microsoft had invested a lot in the R&D of the Kinect technology and was being marketed in a wide range back when it was launched. The company has even tried to bring the Kinect to the mainstream with the Xbox One, but sadly the poor pricing and very limited features made it a failure.
The Kinect was one such accessory that created invisible infrared dots that were mapped in 3D space and allowing tracking of human body movements; indirectly it made gamers move from their place and physically be in the game. It even had voice commands support, for example, “Xbox On” to turn on the Xbox One console.
Though Kinect might be termed as a failure, Microsoft’s R&D and the hardware helped the company with many promising products and technologies that we see coming out from them now. Microsoft’s HaloLens now uses many of the Kinect technologies for depth-sensing and the Windows Hello tech on many laptops takes advantage of the Kinect’s face recognition, and it is even using many of the learnings of Kinect in Windows Mixed Reality headsets.