> 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.

I wasn't comparing the pollution of more products vs less products, but rather the pollution of the same number of products after they're forced to become obsolete (years before their technology becomes eventually) by patents and their closed nature which prevents anyone to properly support/use them forcing people to throw them away.

I can even see merit to the argument that cutting off new supply will force people to recycle old supply to repair and keep their sensors running as well. I know I've got a few that I'll have to keep working.

There already is something else “like” it: the front-facing camera in the iPhone X.

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. :)

While I love Shenzhen's attitude to intellectual property, this is not a solution outside hobby market. I doubt people will dare to release a product in clear violation of Apple's patents (or whoever owns them now).

My expectation is that the no-name hobbyist products (with no clear company to sue) will come first, people will buy them, and then major manufacturers will see them and want to get the hardware into their own products too, at which point they'll probably get interested in licensing Apple's patents. Which means the resulting branded products won't cost $3, but they won't be $1000 either.

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.

It is being disputed by Apple, but Bloomberg claims that "$3 part" is what is keeping iPhone X output low.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-iphone/apple-disput...

Not really even close. While two cameras is nice, is definitely not the same as the structured light approach in the Kinect.

FYI, front camera in X uses structural light, while Kinect 2 uses a more modern time-of-flight (ToF) technology, which delivers better depth resolution.

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."

Note that the depth resolution they are desscribing is 160x160=30,000, which is really standard structured light. Put a 1Mpix camera behind it and you can interpolate ~6 pixels in between to estimate depth/slope.

The iPhone X uses a real depth-sensing system, based on structured light tech from the Kinect, for FaceID.

Wasn't the Kinect technology acquired by Apple? My impression is the top sensor bar in the iPhone X is essentially a miniaturized Kinect, so we should see more Kinect-like applications now that it fits in your pocket.

Apple bought Primesense who made the technology behind Kinect 1. That uses structured light just like the iPhone X.

Kinect 2 uses Time of Flight developed, as far as I know, by Microsoft.

https://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/DanielLau/20131127/205820/Th...

AFAIR, it was acquired by ASUS. Original Kinect was developed by an Israel company Xtion, which now lives as a trademark of ASUS game accessories: https://www.asus.com/3D-Sensor/All-Series/

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.

Primesense was the source of the structured light technology in the Kinect v1. They were purchased by Apple.

They produced an ASIC that ran the structured light system, as well as a custom grating to produce a very specific light pattern.

> acquired by ASUS. Original Kinect was developed by an Israel company Xtion

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]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinect

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PrimeSense

We got tons of use out of the ASUS version of Kinect (Xtion PRO) in my research lab. It worked very well and had a smaller form-factor than Kinect.

How does primesense fit into it? I thought primesense was the company acquired by apple?

Don't know about primesense, I was answering to "Wasn't the Kinect technology acquired by Apple?".

The technology has actually been incorporated into the hololens or windows mixed reality device, which is basically a kinect strapped to your head.

Apple also offers AR kit which is the same concept with similar APIs.

I don't think the maker community hanging on to their Kinects is going to put a dent in the e-waste impact. People are tossing these things in droves because they are a useless waste of space.

Useless unless you want to do motion capture or any one of a bunch of other non-useless tasks.

That’s a tiny fraction of total units sold.