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The Kinect is (re) dead. Because Microsoft has also pulled the plug on its AI-ready twin

The Kinect is (re) dead. Because Microsoft has also pulled the plug on its AI-ready twin

The House of Redmond, committed to controlling expenses (over ten thousand layoffs announced this year), cuts some dead branches, including the production of Azure Kinect, heir to the unfortunate peripheral created to allow Xbox 360 to compete with the Nintendo Wii

If memory serves us correctly, it was the end of October 2017 when some US newspapers began to report the news that Microsoft had decided to stop production of the Kinect, the unfortunate peripheral born in a hurry in an attempt to place the Xbox 360 in the wake of the Nintendo Wii games that were very popular thanks to controllers equipped with gyroscopes and motion sensors.

THE KINECT FLOP IN NUMBERS

In reality, the numbers, although not excellent, were not even the most tragic. At the time of farewell he had placed 35 million pieces in seven years (the launch took place in November 2010). Still, nothing compared to the more than 100 million Wiis in circulation. Yet it didn't get off to a bad start either, placing 133,333 units per day in the first 60 days of launch, from November 4, 2010 to January 3, 2011.

The fact is that Kinect was very close to bringing with it into its whirlpool, in addition to the millions of dollars invested, one of the software houses that had most believed in the peripheral: Rare , Microsoft's first party and author, at the time of the collaboration with Nintendo, of some of the most beautiful video games of the 90s, from the Donkey Kong Country saga to Killer Instinct , passing through Banjo-Kazooie, 007 GoldenEye and of course Perfect Dark .

THE HEIRS OF KINECT

Since nothing of the Kinect is thrown away, the technology used in the gaming peripheral was fed to other Microsoft departments that used it in the most disparate ways, now making it flow into the HoloLens as well as in the Windows Mixed Reality viewer project and in laptops with Windows Hello functionality.

THE DEVICE FOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

In reality, nine years later the Redmond software house gave birth to an heir, Azure Kinect, a device designed for the industrial sector and for use with artificial intelligence, much more advanced than the counterpart offered to the general public which transformed the user's body into controllers.

In fact, it had a respectable 12-megapixel video camera, seven microphones and multiple sensors to capture movements, which made the product suitable for detecting a considerable amount of information from the surrounding environment.

MICROSOFT SAVE

But now, with Microsoft committed to containing expenses after the post-pandemic hangover that had made profits soar (recall that the company has announced over ten thousand layoffs for 2023), understandably the projects that weren't bringing the due income.

As explained in an official post from Microsoft, the company will cease direct production of Kinect Azure and will license the technology to third-party manufacturers. “As the needs of our users and partners evolve, we update our products to support them,” wrote the Bill Gates-founded tech giant in the message on the closure.


This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/e-rimorto-il-kinect-perche-microsoft-ha-staccato-la-spina-anche-al-gemello-riadattato-per-lia/ on Wed, 23 Aug 2023 11:28:04 +0000.