"In 2010, when Microsoft unveiled the Kinect, it pitched the camera as a revolutionary new gaming device. Swing an imaginary lightsaber and that would be translated onscreen. Throw a football and it would be caught on your TV. Fifteen years later, we know the Kinect as an expensive failure. Microsoft overestimated the demand for playing games with your body. But the Kinect did still turn out to be revolutionary - just not for gaming."
"Now, we understand the Kinect is anything but a gaming device. It became a robotics game changer, enjoyed a brief dalliance with pornography, and is now upsold as a ghost hunting toy. None of which would have been possible had a community of hackers not come together to fashion open source drivers for the Kinect, freeing it from the limitations of being locked to the Xbox 360 and opening new frontiers of experimentation, creative expression, and commercial advancement."
"The small camera projected a grid of infrared dots and read deformities in that pattern to discern depth. In an early example of machine learning, it recognized human limbs and gestures. "Those capabilities existed in research and industrial systems for many years," he adds. Those systems cost in the region of $5,000 to $12,000. Here was Microsoft selling a variation of the technology for $150."
Microsoft released the Kinect in 2010 as a gesture-based gaming camera, but consumer gaming demand proved limited and the product failed commercially in that role. The device used an infrared dot pattern and depth sensing to detect human limbs and gestures, bringing capabilities previously limited to costly industrial systems into an affordable consumer product. A hacker community developed open-source drivers that freed the Kinect from the Xbox, enabling uses in robotics, adult entertainment, ghost-hunting toys, and other experimental and commercial applications. The Kinect democratized access to depth-sensing technology and spurred wide-ranging creative and technical repurposing.
Read at The Verge
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