This. And thanks to software/hardware patents, the technology will die with the product, or remain dormant until the owner will either decide to make something else with it or (not holding my breath) release it under a FOSS license. In the meantime, like always, landfills in the 3rd world will be inundated by more hardware which could be still perfectly useable if its life didn't depend on the wishes of a single company.
Well that's a silly comment, because by choosing not to make more then there would actually be fewer kinects in landfills than if they had decided to continue manufacturing. The decision to "build more" has absolutely nothing to do with folks deciding to throw away the ones they've already bought.
On one hand, you could see this as fooling around with Kinect tech now requiring a $1000 investment in an iPhone. (Or buying a Kinect used; there are still plenty on the market.)
On the other hand, you could believe in the inevitability of Shenzhen to take the probably $3 part Apple has designed, stick it into a little housing with a micro controller, and commoditize “Kinect Minis” within the year. :)
I don't expect Apple would willingly license their patent to their competitors in the mobile space (who, after all, would just want to slap a FaceID-equivalent feature into their own phones); but they'd probably be interested in licensing it to e.g. electronic door-lock companies, or action-camera companies (add a "depth" track to your video), etc.
My guess is that rather than the Kinect, what people will probably be buying 2-5 years from now for "commercially scalable" projects is an LG USB webcam that has Apple's miniaturized sensors embedded, and is using the (by-then-standardized) no-name Shenzhen remake of Apple's face-recognition ML-accelerator core.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-iphone/apple-disput...
From https://www.apple.com/iphone-x/:
"Face ID is enabled by the TrueDepth camera and is simple to set up. It projects and analyzes more than 30,000 invisible dots to create a precise depth map of your face."
Kinect 2 uses Time of Flight developed, as far as I know, by Microsoft.
https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DanielLau/20131127/205820/Th...
The core technology (structured light in iPhone X and Kinect 1, ToF in Kinect 2) is rather straightforward (for a computer vision researcher, that is...), it's hardware (embedded CPU, cheap sensors and lasers) that enabled its mass adoption.
They produced an ASIC that ran the structured light system, as well as a custom grating to produce a very specific light pattern.
Xtion was a Primesense ASUS partnership to bring the tracking technology to the PC.
Xtion was not a separate company but rather an ASUS branded Kinect-like sensor.
Primesense made the sensors for both Kinect and the Xtion.[0]
Primesense was later purchased by Apple in 2013.[1]
Apple also offers AR kit which is the same concept with similar APIs.
Another much under-appreciated aspect of Kinect was what an absolutely phenomenal video conferencing system it was - using Skype on Xbox was on par with expensive custom systems. Great speakerphone (that audio recognition) and it would resize the focus on the fly to include all the faces in the room (panning around).
At any rate, the idea lives on in Apple's iPhone X in a much more practical application.
> Don't forget, smartwatches originated from a highly successful Kickstarter campaign.
This is a big stretch, in my opinion. I think we'd have worked out that a screen on our wrist with useful info is nice regardless of what happened on Kickstarter, this wasn't exactly an incredible discovery.
There had been countless fitness tracking watches that aren't really all that far removed from the public want from smart watches from Garmin et al long before Pebble tried their thing too. The barrier was arguably getting efficient SoCs that could last a day doing something useful far more than it was anything to do with crowd funding.
> Tech giants are very much capable of generating cash, but are damned by their inability to create gold.
This is getting a bit silly now.
But you know why it is so, don't you? The allure for an information company of having an always-on, always internet connected, high-sensitivity microphone, running proprietary software doing god knows what, the allure of having such a device in as many homes as possible is only too obvious.
The only thing more shameful than them pushing this garbage is the consumers' willingness to eat it all up.
If you're into software, you could make it exciting. Perhaps write a scraper to strip the audio off porn clips, mix it up with old Khruschev speeches?
Could be a tactic to fight systems like these - overwhelm them with garbage data.
In a fight to protect your privacy, the only way to win is to not willingly give up your data, even if that means not making use of new systems or taking active countermeasures against tracking systems.
I think that's the problem, I figure it was meant to increase XBox game licensing money, not turn a direct profit.
The issue here is that it's being bought without games. They lose money on the tech, and then don't make it up on the licensing.
I swear that was a thing for a while, but I can't find any sources, so I might be mis-remembering
Sony didn't like this, as they were losing money on every PS3, so they disabled the functionality.
Also don't forget that Sony Ericsson released the MBW-100 smartwatch[1] several years before Kickstarter existed ... so I'm not sure how they could have originated on Kickstarter.
If you want to kill this, you need a cooperate culture, that anonymizes project critic and punishes claims of authorship to critique.
the problem is if google doesn't go into the "speaker with a voice assistant" space, they allow amazon to possibly gain dominance in said space. this is why everyone wants to get in on drone delivery, self-driving cars, vr, etc..
and while "creative", the kinect wasn't a thing microsoft invented either. in fact, primesense, the company that created the original kinect got bought out by apple, and basically that tech is in the iphone x now.
I suppose at least the data is worth a lot towards better voice control efforts.
Before I left we were doing the work to transition to v2 and were well aware that it was not an earner for MS, but I think the prevailing notion was this was too important to the research community and MS was in it for the long game hoping for it to take off in other industries.
In any case, I reached out to a friend there who tells me they were aware of this eventuality for some time and have another option (smaller, more accurate) that they are in the process of migrating to.
Their dominance seems to have further pervaded the notion that utility and viability = profitability within this system.
(and the hockey puck sounds pretty... pretty dumb)
Youre either misrepresenting or woefully misunderstanding this. The echo et al are no more about selling a $50 shopping list speaker than when Amazon/Barnes and Noble/Sony were going at over $50 e-ink readers.
> Don't forget, smartwatches originated from a highly successful Kickstarter campaign.
Smartwatches have been a techno-futurist pie-in-the-sky product for almost 50 years now.
Apple outselling Rolex in 2016 (the same year Pebble died) arguably did far more to cement this, and in a significantly shorter period of time.
Pebble went out of business, the very opposite of commercial viability.
Apple went on to outsell a 4.7 billion dollar player in close to a year. If the choice of Rolex offends, insert the name of more or less any other watch manufacturer you like, the comparison usually stands, or at the least shows the exceptional sales the line achieved in a short period of time. If anything, it's even more impressive when one compares to 2016 revenues of cheaper watch makers such as Seiko, Fossil, Citizen etc.
If anything, it's surprising Microsoft kept building and subsidizing these things for as long as they did.
I don't think you're giving these companies adequate credit for their innovation. :-)
It's worth remembering that the Echo, a voice-powered home assistant that can be spoken to anywhere in a room ("far-field" voice recognition), was novel when Amazon introduced it. Similarly, the digital e-ink reader was novel when Amazon launched the Kindle. Two other concepts that seem novel to me are the Amazon Go stores (checkout-less shopping) and Amazon Prime Air (automated drone delivery), both works-in-progress. Consider Amazon Web Services (est. 2006) and the cloud services boom.
Amazon created the first devices/services that resulted in the trends for home assistants and ebook readers (etc.), so I don't think it's fair to name them as "mostly resigned to following trends".
Similarly, although Google seems to have followed Amazon's lead with respect to home assistants, it's certainly innovating in the capabilities of their service, and in other areas. Google's voice assistant has access to incredible amounts of information, presumably powered by Google's search and understanding of questions and context. While both Alexa and Google can answer "When was Abraham Lincoln born?", only Google can more difficult questions like "Who was the second CEO of Microsoft?" (per my test today). However, none of the offerings can yet answer "When was the second CEO of Microsoft born?" Boiling the situation down to shopping lists ignores the capability variation in products.
Of course every company will follow trends to some extent, since to do otherwise is to give up a potential market segment. Companies don't exist per se to create trends; they exist to capitalize on business opportunities. A lot of the big tech companies have expertise they can leverage to enter new tech segments, or have related services that they can integrate. E.g., if Apple has Siri and the Apple TV, then a home assistant may still be a sensible play, even if Amazon did it first.
Trying to create a new trend is risky and requires large investment. For every hit like the Echo, you might strike out like the Fire Phone; for every hit like the Pixel phone you might strike out like Google Glass or have moderate success like Kinect. It makes sense for companies to create offerings when there's a proven model to follow in addition to investing in new innovative ideas.
If following is the only thing a company does, then you might judge them as not being innovative; but before you do that, you should look at the innovative things they're trying too, such as the Glass, the Kindle, the Kinect. Apple has been incredibly innovative in their phone design and security features: the first to offer a touch-based phone with no keyboard (as far as I know); the first to offer fingerprint-based unlock instead of PIN code unlock (so convenient!), and now face-recognition based unlock; Siri may have been the first useful voice assistant. Apple's security and privacy has been industry-leading, e.g. Secure Enclave. Apple CarPlay is a great experience and surpasses every other car integration system I've used.
I believe that the reason all of the named companies have continued to be successful and remain market leaders is because they are innovating in products and services.
Gives me some strange feels about the current state of the tech economy. The Kinect is being retired at the same time Amazon and Google are caught up in a dumb contest to see who can produce the best hockey-puck-sized speaker that can add items to your shopping list. As overwhelmingly large as tech giants like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Apple are, they seem mostly resigned to following trends, as opposed to creating new ones.
Don't forget, smartwatches originated from a highly successful Kickstarter campaign. Same can be said for VR. Bitcoin, and blockchain by extension, originated from a white paper published by someone who's still to this day a complete mystery.
Tech giants are very much capable of generating cash, but are damned by their inability to create gold.