Something I do wanna note here in the comments that I didn't mention in the video (it was already getting really long): speaking purely about the hardware, it really isn't that bad of a device. And in fact there are companies in the fields of robotics and motion tracking and such that *still* have kinects in their offices in use to this day. Because ultimately it is still a super cheap and accessible Depth-sensing camera which has tons of applications in those kinds of fields. Especially if they're willing to write custom drivers and software to better utilize the technology. Hell some people have even managed to rig it up to use it for Full-Body Tracking in combination with modern VR tech without having to strap controllers to their feet. The problem of course being that that still doesn't really solve the issue of how the Kinect was used by Microsoft in the gaming space. And on top of that, Microsoft kind of screwed even this aspect of the Kinect up because the Kinect 2 had its cable changed to have a proprietary port instead of a normal USB port, which means that you can't just plug it into a PC with a custom driver right out of the box and you need to buy a special adaptor for it which is of course now increasingly difficult to find ever since they discontinued it. So most of those companies using the Kinect for other applications are actually still using the original 360 Kinect instead of the updated Xbox One's Kinect 2, which is somehow even funnier to me lol
You might be one of the first people on UA-cam that I've ever heard mention the word abstraction in relation to games. Its something that I think people fail to grasp the importance of or even understand that everything in a game is an abstraction.
Abstraction is something I think a lot of people just don't think about because often the goal of a game is to make you forget that you're playing a game. A game with great controls and a perfect flow state often makes the controller an afterthought, it's something that your body just interfaces with subconsciously to make the game happen. It's like with driving. Most people don't think "I'm going to turn the steering wheel to change the orientation of the tires so that the car goes left" they just think "I'm turning left"
My favorite memory of using the kinect was trolling my sister when she played Skyrim. The Xbox 360 version had kinect voice commands, so I would randomly sneak up and shout "Fus Ro Dah" to make her blast away NPCs and get attacked by the guards, then run away cackling while she screamed in rage at me.
Also don't forget that Microsoft was really thinking AMERICAN LIVING ROOMS. So bigger, with space for the television. Many people in smaller houses don't HAVE much space before a television to start with. For instance Japan! Even in Europe we tend to like to put a TABLE in that area...
That was definitely bs, but ironically, a game about talking to someone as if over a webcam fits kinect better than most other gameplay ideas that were pitched or made for it.
I got the Kinect, played it for maybe ... A few weeks total including bringing it to family gatherings but then just forgot it existed for lack of good games using this thing, same for the PS Move.
I personally don't like to move that much while playing games. So motion control is already nothing for me. Party games with friends were kinda fun using the Kinect, but that's all
Yeah a good takeaway from this is that while I do think the Kinect is the worst of the bunch, all of the motion control systems of that era were pretty much doomed to be short term gimmicks without lasting appeal imo. It really wasn’t until VR started to become popular that I think motion controls really made proper game design sense
Funny to me how people complained about privacy only for a few year later the same consumers bought ring cameras for their homes connected to the internet, Amazon Alexa in almost every room. Having a app track their entire family on their phones for any hacker to get access to your kids location at any moment
I've never used the PS move controller, but I have experience with the Kinect and Wii. The Wii always felt easy to use, since the IR aiming combined with the accelerometer and physical buttons makes a lot of tasks simple to do, even for non gamers. The Kinect, in theory, works fine. I used to play Kinect Sports/Adventure and the Just Dance games, all of which work fine, but not as easy as the Wii. I did play other games on Kinect, but I don't remember how those felt to play. So while I find myself going back to play Wii games somewhat often, I haven't turned on my Kinect in years.
It was a fun thing to play at summer camp at the wellness center my parents went to, but that’s all it was to me a hobby. Most of us kids at the camp would just play on our DS and chat about games.
I don't mind different accessories for Consoles, with their own style of gameplay. however I hate when these accessories come to dominate the core experience, especially if it takes over the entire e3 press conference.
If Microsoft had only chosen to market the kinect as an accessory to be able to play dance games or party games, the kinect would have probably lived on as just this...Aka a Side accessory. Similiar to buzzer,Singstar mic or dance mat. But unfortunately Microsoft wanted to hype up kinect as the accessory that would replace the main accessory..Controller. Which gave them a huge sale, however follow by a massive crash.
Man, you hit pretty hard ! I mostly agree your analysis about the Kinect not being suitable for a satisfying gaming experience. But still, I remember buying an Xbox 360 because of the Kinect, eager to live a new gaming experience. I faced it's limitations pretty quickly but I still had fun with my family in short intense gaming sessions. So, I agree Kinect it's a clunky and limited piece of technology in the gaming field, but it was exciting to experience something new, something involving your body. As for the lack of 1st person perspective, I've always been a first person view hater so it never bothered me. But it sure can be a problem for this type of games. To conclude, I agree Kinect had many limitations but it was something new and intriguing. I miss this kind of crazy innovations nowadays.
I had a Kinect. Thing was trash. I had a addon to “improve the functions” and still didn’t work well. Only exception with the Kinect was Kinect sports series and dancing games that’ll usually work
I feel like the Kinect was a shittier version of the PlayStation EyeToy, but I don't remember if it was better than the Kinect because it's been too ling since.
Neither the Playstation Eyetoy and the Xbox Kinect on Xbox 360 were that much different from each other with their performance of their software. I am not sure of the performance of the Xbox One Kinect, but it did not fare much better with the Xbox fans which makes me believe it was not worth for Microsoft to spend more time with making more software for it, since they discontinued support for Kinect for Xbox One around mid 2010s. I always believed motion controls peaked with Nintendo and Playstation with their actual own motion controls such as on the Wii and Playstation Move back in the early 2010s before Virtual Reality gained interest later on.
Kinect was a great tool and opened the door to depth sensors and consumer LIDAR alternative products like the iPhone cameras and similar visual mocap/scanning technologies. It also pioneered as among the first IoT smart devices. The Kinect is still used by companies today in business and attractions, outside of gaming. I think its downfall was the result of two major mistakes. One, it wasn't widely supported by Microsoft Game Studios or third party devs as they felt no reason to include it post-360. Two, Microsoft tried forcing it on people that were still privacy conscious leading to immediate rejection. They have to want it themselves. Microsoft doesn't know how to create a need and explain how that product fills said need. Nor do they know how to appeal to existing customers. Steve Jobs was a master at that. He could sell people a plain pen and charge a thousand dollars if he wanted to. Microsoft is usually ahead of the curve with products, enhancements, and ideas but damn do they suck at marketing them to people. Everything they touch becomes immediately uncool or unwanted. Like the Zune, pen and touch tablets, Windows Phone, Xbox One, HoloLens, Bing, Cortana, and Skype.
I was very hype for the kinect when it was first announced and I thought the whole kinect wave was quite interesting to take part in. however i really hate when microsoft chose to let the kinect dominate 3 e3 years in a row.
Feedback is not required for boxing with shadow. Punch Out makes it accessible game. Full body tracking would have helped with dodge, duck. I agree that designing games with body position only controls is unnecessary limitation.
What was that TANK game again the FORCED you to use those commands. In a high action, time is ticking, situation. Where one wrong move would mean you lost that level. Good times, good times...
While many of the points in this video are valid my problem is when people say how limited it is for games. It's kind of the wrong mindset of what you perceive as a gaming experience. As the Kinect in my opinion is just a different kind of experience to gaming that you can't get with just a controller. For example fitness games like ( Xbox fitness ) where you would workout and it tracks you but it also has a heart monitor sensor in it which can tell you heart rate which if your into that sort of thing that's a really good experience. Or something like ( child of Eden ) which is an on rail shooter / rhythm game where you can use the kinect motion controls or just a controller again same game but two different kinds of experiences. And there are some games like Crimson dragon and Lara Croft Tomb Raider where you can use a controller and Kinect at the same time. But my biggest critique about videos like this is the Kinect is not in a vacuum. unlike something like VR headsets or the Wii motion controls if you don't want to stand up and use motion controls you don't have a choice where you don't have to use the Kinect for every game on this console unlike VR headsets and the Nintendo Wii again giving you more unique kind of experiences for one platform. The sheer lack of software for this is what made it feel broken not the limitations of the device itself
The Kinect is a "Just Dance" game peripheral. That is what it woks well for, and it's mediocre at a few more games. Playing a golf game with the Kinect is a nightmare, because it can't track a swing once your hands are behind you. Although the Wii motion controls worked well, the only games that were fun with it were the few games specifically designed for the controls. It's almost as if nobody at Microsoft bothered playing the Wii, they just heard the hype and assumed motion controls were the future.
Maybe if the kinect used xrays instead of infrared it might be able to track skeletal joints a lot better. Although that might cause other problems... 🤔
You do know that Dan Central was a much better game than just dance and that the Xbox Xbox one shipping controller was designed for use with connect. It had three infrared bulbs that could identify up to eight separate controllers and track them individually. The gunstringer was also. adelight i'll give you a clue, just like PVR too, connect to was not about games they were only a side thing
The Xbox series x and the PS5 will be the last consoles I buy, the games have stopped being fun mid way thru last gen. Gonna stick with PC and emulate. Will focuse on retro collection.
Yeah but it a crappier alt input method for most things. Would you rather navigate a menu with buttons and a stick or a kinect? Would you rather race with a racing wheel or a controller or by holding your arms in the air. Basically the only genre it improved was dancing games.
@@toonpik7 people comparing 2013 technology to the VR we have now and trying to make the argument that the Kinect wasn't worth iterating on. It was janky, but everything kinda was at the time, VR is still fairly janky now, while requiring way more equipment and being a lot more expensive than the Kinect.
If we have patience for all the nonsense associated with VR We should have had patience for the kinect. A couple of iterations and it would have been no more clunky than VR is currently. Haptic feedback gloves.
I played a motion controlled guitar hero like game for drums and it raped my arms, I got horrible cramps because I wasn't hitting anything so my arms didn't bounce back instead I had to go all the way down, stop myself and lift again
![The History of the Xbox 360 Kinect | Past Mortem [SSFF]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/MmJ3LICVtsY/mqdefault.jpg)
Something I do wanna note here in the comments that I didn't mention in the video (it was already getting really long): speaking purely about the hardware, it really isn't that bad of a device. And in fact there are companies in the fields of robotics and motion tracking and such that *still* have kinects in their offices in use to this day. Because ultimately it is still a super cheap and accessible Depth-sensing camera which has tons of applications in those kinds of fields. Especially if they're willing to write custom drivers and software to better utilize the technology. Hell some people have even managed to rig it up to use it for Full-Body Tracking in combination with modern VR tech without having to strap controllers to their feet.
The problem of course being that that still doesn't really solve the issue of how the Kinect was used by Microsoft in the gaming space. And on top of that, Microsoft kind of screwed even this aspect of the Kinect up because the Kinect 2 had its cable changed to have a proprietary port instead of a normal USB port, which means that you can't just plug it into a PC with a custom driver right out of the box and you need to buy a special adaptor for it which is of course now increasingly difficult to find ever since they discontinued it. So most of those companies using the Kinect for other applications are actually still using the original 360 Kinect instead of the updated Xbox One's Kinect 2, which is somehow even funnier to me lol
You might be one of the first people on UA-cam that I've ever heard mention the word abstraction in relation to games. Its something that I think people fail to grasp the importance of or even understand that everything in a game is an abstraction.
How do most people fail to see that video games are abstractions? I actually don’t believe that at all. Could you elaborate?
Abstraction is something I think a lot of people just don't think about because often the goal of a game is to make you forget that you're playing a game. A game with great controls and a perfect flow state often makes the controller an afterthought, it's something that your body just interfaces with subconsciously to make the game happen. It's like with driving. Most people don't think "I'm going to turn the steering wheel to change the orientation of the tires so that the car goes left" they just think "I'm turning left"
My favorite memory of using the kinect was trolling my sister when she played Skyrim. The Xbox 360 version had kinect voice commands, so I would randomly sneak up and shout "Fus Ro Dah" to make her blast away NPCs and get attacked by the guards, then run away cackling while she screamed in rage at me.
Saying random words to see what activates shouts is so damn fun. I used the kinect to much since the voice control was decent.
Also don't forget that Microsoft was really thinking AMERICAN LIVING ROOMS.
So bigger, with space for the television.
Many people in smaller houses don't HAVE much space before a television to start with. For instance Japan!
Even in Europe we tend to like to put a TABLE in that area...
Interesting topic. Microsoft was in such a hurry to market the Kinect but forgot to actually build the functionality
Let’s never forget Microsoft and Peter Molyneux’s complete bs with Project Milo
That was definitely bs, but ironically, a game about talking to someone as if over a webcam fits kinect better than most other gameplay ideas that were pitched or made for it.
WHERE IS MILO PETER. WHAT DID YOU DO
I got the Kinect, played it for maybe ... A few weeks total including bringing it to family gatherings but then just forgot it existed for lack of good games using this thing, same for the PS Move.
I personally don't like to move that much while playing games. So motion control is already nothing for me. Party games with friends were kinda fun using the Kinect, but that's all
Yeah a good takeaway from this is that while I do think the Kinect is the worst of the bunch, all of the motion control systems of that era were pretty much doomed to be short term gimmicks without lasting appeal imo. It really wasn’t until VR started to become popular that I think motion controls really made proper game design sense
Funny to me how people complained about privacy only for a few year later the same consumers bought ring cameras for their homes connected to the internet, Amazon Alexa in almost every room. Having a app track their entire family on their phones for any hacker to get access to your kids location at any moment
I've never used the PS move controller, but I have experience with the Kinect and Wii. The Wii always felt easy to use, since the IR aiming combined with the accelerometer and physical buttons makes a lot of tasks simple to do, even for non gamers. The Kinect, in theory, works fine. I used to play Kinect Sports/Adventure and the Just Dance games, all of which work fine, but not as easy as the Wii. I did play other games on Kinect, but I don't remember how those felt to play. So while I find myself going back to play Wii games somewhat often, I haven't turned on my Kinect in years.
When you boil it down, the concept behind Kinect is playing videogames by miming.
It was a fun thing to play at summer camp at the wellness center my parents went to, but that’s all it was to me a hobby. Most of us kids at the camp would just play on our DS and chat about games.
I don't mind different accessories for Consoles, with their own style of gameplay.
however I hate when these accessories come to dominate the core experience, especially if it takes over the entire e3 press conference.
If Microsoft had only chosen to market the kinect as an accessory to be able to play dance games or party games, the kinect would have probably lived on as just this...Aka a Side accessory. Similiar to buzzer,Singstar mic or dance mat.
But unfortunately Microsoft wanted to hype up kinect as the accessory that would replace the main accessory..Controller. Which gave them a huge sale, however follow by a massive crash.
Man, you hit pretty hard ! I mostly agree your analysis about the Kinect not being suitable for a satisfying gaming experience.
But still, I remember buying an Xbox 360 because of the Kinect, eager to live a new gaming experience. I faced it's limitations pretty quickly but I still had fun with my family in short intense gaming sessions.
So, I agree Kinect it's a clunky and limited piece of technology in the gaming field, but it was exciting to experience something new, something involving your body.
As for the lack of 1st person perspective, I've always been a first person view hater so it never bothered me. But it sure can be a problem for this type of games.
To conclude, I agree Kinect had many limitations but it was something new and intriguing. I miss this kind of crazy innovations nowadays.
I had a Kinect. Thing was trash. I had a addon to “improve the functions” and still didn’t work well. Only exception with the Kinect was Kinect sports series and dancing games that’ll usually work
I bought the Kinect back in 2011 or something, it came with the X360 Slim console. I think I played it a total of
the FPS actor looking behind him 😂😂
They could've at least added a dummy controller solely for button input but they didn't even do that.
I feel like the Kinect was a shittier version of the PlayStation EyeToy, but I don't remember if it was better than the Kinect because it's been too ling since.
Neither the Playstation Eyetoy and the Xbox Kinect on Xbox 360 were that much different from each other with their performance of their software. I am not sure of the performance of the Xbox One Kinect, but it did not fare much better with the Xbox fans which makes me believe it was not worth for Microsoft to spend more time with making more software for it, since they discontinued support for Kinect for Xbox One around mid 2010s. I always believed motion controls peaked with Nintendo and Playstation with their actual own motion controls such as on the Wii and Playstation Move back in the early 2010s before Virtual Reality gained interest later on.
Kinect tracking was so advanced hospitals and colleges use them to this day.
I bought a Kinect in 2011 or so, and still haven't gotten around to trying it.
The closest we'll get to perfect tracking is mocap tech, but even then, they still go over the capture data to fine tune movements.
Kinect was a great tool and opened the door to depth sensors and consumer LIDAR alternative products like the iPhone cameras and similar visual mocap/scanning technologies. It also pioneered as among the first IoT smart devices. The Kinect is still used by companies today in business and attractions, outside of gaming.
I think its downfall was the result of two major mistakes. One, it wasn't widely supported by Microsoft Game Studios or third party devs as they felt no reason to include it post-360. Two, Microsoft tried forcing it on people that were still privacy conscious leading to immediate rejection. They have to want it themselves. Microsoft doesn't know how to create a need and explain how that product fills said need. Nor do they know how to appeal to existing customers. Steve Jobs was a master at that. He could sell people a plain pen and charge a thousand dollars if he wanted to.
Microsoft is usually ahead of the curve with products, enhancements, and ideas but damn do they suck at marketing them to people. Everything they touch becomes immediately uncool or unwanted. Like the Zune, pen and touch tablets, Windows Phone, Xbox One, HoloLens, Bing, Cortana, and Skype.
Abstraction?
My dad works at Nintendo and so I got an unreleased version of DMC for kinetict.
There is now a hole in my roof.
I was very hype for the kinect when it was first announced and I thought the whole kinect wave was quite interesting to take part in.
however i really hate when microsoft chose to let the kinect dominate 3 e3 years in a row.
Feedback is not required for boxing with shadow. Punch Out makes it accessible game. Full body tracking would have helped with dodge, duck.
I agree that designing games with body position only controls is unnecessary limitation.
Kinect was nothing more than a further development of eyetoy. Unfortunately, they have only added more problems through advanced technology
My mom got me an xbox elite that had the kinect bundled.. I had fun using it while playing skyrim with the thu'um lol
Funny. I’ve been saying the same thing you said in this video since 2010. I always thought it was a bad idea. Games need buttons. That’s it.
What was that TANK game again the FORCED you to use those commands. In a high action, time is ticking, situation. Where one wrong move would mean you lost that level.
Good times, good times...
While many of the points in this video are valid my problem is when people say how limited it is for games.
It's kind of the wrong mindset of what you perceive as a gaming experience.
As the Kinect in my opinion is just a different kind of experience to gaming that you can't get with just a controller.
For example fitness games like ( Xbox fitness ) where you would workout and it tracks you but it also has a heart monitor sensor in it which can tell you heart rate which if your into that sort of thing that's a really good experience.
Or something like ( child of Eden ) which is an on rail shooter / rhythm game where you can use the kinect motion controls or just a controller again same game but two different kinds of experiences. And there are some games like Crimson dragon and Lara Croft Tomb Raider where you can use a controller and Kinect at the same time.
But my biggest critique about videos like this is the Kinect is not in a vacuum. unlike something like VR headsets or the Wii motion controls if you don't want to stand up and use motion controls you don't have a choice where you don't have to use the Kinect for every game on this console unlike VR headsets and the Nintendo Wii again giving you more unique kind of experiences for one platform.
The sheer lack of software for this is what made it feel broken not the limitations of the device itself
The Kinect is a "Just Dance" game peripheral. That is what it woks well for, and it's mediocre at a few more games. Playing a golf game with the Kinect is a nightmare, because it can't track a swing once your hands are behind you. Although the Wii motion controls worked well, the only games that were fun with it were the few games specifically designed for the controls. It's almost as if nobody at Microsoft bothered playing the Wii, they just heard the hype and assumed motion controls were the future.
Yeah. Wii remains king of Motion controls!
Ultimately Kinect ended up being Siri for XBox menus, and (except perhaps the newest update for ios 18) Siri is still useless.
Interesting points!
Maybe if the kinect used xrays instead of infrared it might be able to track skeletal joints a lot better. Although that might cause other problems... 🤔
I'm playing asgards wrath 2 and after 1 battle I'm exhausted lol
Because the NSA watched literally everything you did from it.
You do know that Dan Central was a much better game than just dance and that the Xbox Xbox one shipping controller was designed for use with connect. It had three infrared bulbs that could identify up to eight separate controllers and track them individually. The gunstringer was also. adelight
i'll give you a clue, just like PVR too, connect to was not about games they were only a side thing
The Xbox series x and the PS5 will be the last consoles I buy, the games have stopped being fun mid way thru last gen. Gonna stick with PC and emulate. Will focuse on retro collection.
Kinect ≠ VR
And it wasn't trying to be
It is simply an alternative input method
Yeah but it a crappier alt input method for most things. Would you rather navigate a menu with buttons and a stick or a kinect? Would you rather race with a racing wheel or a controller or by holding your arms in the air. Basically the only genre it improved was dancing games.
@@toonpik7 people comparing 2013 technology to the VR we have now and trying to make the argument that the Kinect wasn't worth iterating on.
It was janky, but everything kinda was at the time, VR is still fairly janky now, while requiring way more equipment and being a lot more expensive than the Kinect.
If we have patience for all the nonsense associated with VR
We should have had patience for the kinect.
A couple of iterations and it would have been no more clunky than VR is currently.
Haptic feedback gloves.
Haptic feedback gloves are technology wise closer to the wii controllers than the kinnect.
I believe the original version was planned to be way better but Microsoft cheaped out
yeah but the entire point of the video is that even a better kinect would still have the same flaws...
it sounds like you are spitting into your mic
I played a motion controlled guitar hero like game for drums and it raped my arms, I got horrible cramps because I wasn't hitting anything so my arms didn't bounce back instead I had to go all the way down, stop myself and lift again