You remember the Kinect, right? The device we all know and love. The Kinect — the camera that tracks your motion and voice and pipes those inputs into the Xbox home video-game console. We love it! I have some bad news, though: It’s dead.
Fast Company is reporting that Microsoft has finally, mercifully, stopped manufacturing the Kinect. The Kinect was equipped with a regular camera, an infrared camera to track movement, and on the Xbox One’s upgraded version, a microphone for voice commands.
The end of the Kinect has been a long time coming. The device played a central role in the Xbox One, which launched with a camera bundled with every system. For a time, Microsoft had considered requiring it in order for the console to work, but it had to quickly scrap those plans after consumers weren’t into the idea of an always-on microphone and camera in their living room.
After Microsoft stopped making the Kinect compulsory, people stopped buying it voluntarily, developers stopped making games for it, and it started collecting dust in everyone’s homes. But parts of the Kinect live on. For one, the Amazon Echo and Google Home have taken the field of voice commands to new heights, and the device’s capabilities are still being harnessed outside of the realm of video games.The Kinect may be gone, but we’ll always have this amazing video of the device’s body-tracking glitching during its initial reveal.
