Kinect is dead. The writing has been on the wall for years, at least since Microsoft de-bundled the motion-tracking system from the Xbox One in 2014, knocking $100 off the price tag and making the system more competitive with the PlayStation 4.
The Kinect debuted in 2010 with the Xbox 360, and it had a good run, overall: Microsoft sold roughly 35 million devices in total. However, across its iterations and upgrades, the Kinect never quite found its market — the one application that would turn the hardware into an essential piece of home technology. It wasn't a conversational, connected, voice-activated system like Google Home or Amazon Alexa, and game developers lost interest in the device as virtual and mixed reality rose to the fore. The Kinect was a product out of time.
That's not to say it didn't contribute to some truly wild experiences over the years. Developers quickly applied Kinect to surgery, physical therapy and a range of other medical uses. Three years after its debut, the Kinect was able to read sign language. Musicians flocked to the technology, applying it to live shows and videos. And then there were the games: Fantasia: Music Evolved, D4: Dark Dreams Don't Die and Fru were brilliant examples of the breadth of experience possible via Kinect's gesture-tracking interface. Even Kinect Sports Rivals, for all of its flaws, laid the groundwork for local multiplayer in motion-controlled gaming.
Below, we've collected a handful of trippy, strange and downright cool Kinect experiments from its seven years on the market. The Kinect is dead; long live Kinect.
The Aquatop projector turned a bathtub into a touchscreen surface, powered by bath salts and Kinect. From researchers at the Koike Laboratory at Tokyo's University of Electro-Communications, Aquatop let people pinch and drag the water to manipulate images and play games — all without the fear of getting a phone or tablet wet.
You could also call this one the “Chewbacca cosplay simulator,” if you're feeling saucy. New York-based artist Daniel Rozin created a “mirror” out of nearly 1,000 black and white pom-poms, using the Kinect to track people's movements and power 464 servos to respond in kind. This is the artistic side of Kinect — something ridiculous, thought-provoking and completely impractical.
Once upon a time, the New York Hall of Science hosted a sprawling, interactive forest designed to help kids better understand the core tenets of sustainability. Connected Worlds featured six different digital biomes, including a 40-foot waterfall and movable “logs” lying about the play space. It took a dozen Kinect cameras, dangling in midair, to make the whole thing possible.
Old, meet new. Composer Chris Vik added Kinect to a huge 83-year-old pipe organ in Melbourne, Australia, and he was able to play it with gestures alone. The Town Hall organ had been retrofitted to accept MIDI input in the 1990s, so Vik wrote some code, hooked up a Kinect, and voilà.
In July, scientists at the Field Museum of Natural History had a problem: They needed to scan the skull of a Tyrannosaurus rex, but their equipment wouldn't fit around the beast's massive jaw. Enter: Kinect. Researchers were able to scan the entire five-foot fossil and investigate a series of holes in its jaw, all for thousands of dollars less than using traditional scanning systems.
Nine Inch Nails' frontman, Trent Reznor, and art director Rob Sheridan are pretty big nerds, and they took the Kinect under their wings on a festival tour in 2013. During his set, the Kinect tracked Reznor's movements and projected them onto a series of mobile screens as a distorted kind of mirror. We talked with Sheridan this week about the death of the Kinect; read his thoughts right here.
Self-taught South Korean programmer Jae Kwan Ko took the Kinect to a new level of militaristic might, applying the hardware to the Demilitarized Zone separating North and South Korea. The Kinect system monitored the border for movement, and it was even able to discern the difference between animals and humans.
RoomAlive was an internal project from Microsoft that represented the dreams of gaming and sci-fi fans worldwide. It essentially turned a living room into a Star Trek-style holodeck, projecting interactive objects and environments on the walls and floors. RoomAlive never made it to the stage where it was ready for consumer consumption, but the fact that this type of technology existed — in 2014, even — was incredibly exciting.
The second season of Stranger Things just premiered on Netflix, and now, Minecraft is capitalising on the moment.
The Microsoft-owned building game has announced that players who love the hit retro-horror TV show can now buy a new skin pack based on it. It'll bring the whole cast, too, including Hopper, Mike, Eleven, Dustin, Lucas, and Will. There's even an entire trailer to promote the skin pack (watch it all – and at the very end you'll see that freaky monster from the alternate universe).
You can buy the skin pack for all “Bedrock” versions of Minecraft, so that means for mobile, Windows 10, and Xbox One, for $3 (or 490 coins) in the Minecraft Marketplace. But be sure to check out the new season as well. Once again, it is set in Hawkins in autumn of '84. The story continues from season one, complete with the core cast and characters, as well as several new characters.
We'll get to meet tomboy Max and her older step-brother Billy, a woman named Roman, RadioShack manager Bob Newby, Department of Energy agent Dr. Owens, and conspiracy theorist Murray Bauman. No, none of these characters are in this skin pack, unfortunately.
Back in August, it was announced that Minecon — the annual celebration of all things Minecraft — would take an altogether different form for 2017. The newly branded Minecon World aimed to expand the festivities well beyond the confines of the single city chosen to host days full of activities each year, instead taking the form of a 90-minute jam-packed event broadcast live from Atlanta to viewing parties and movie theaters around the world.
And if that wasn't enough to catch your eye — which, let's be real, is very appealing to those of us who love Minecraft but maybe don't have the ability to travel to the highly hyped event each year — on Oct. 19, it was announced that there would be another familiar face hosting the event beside the legendary Lydia Winters: Will Arnett. That's right; the man formerly known as GOB Bluth, Devon Banks, and Bojack Horseman is a Minecraft fan, too.
“My boys and I have so much fun playing Minecraft,” Arnett said in a statement about the event, adding, “but even more than that, I love how Minecraft inspires so much creativity in them. I couldn't be more excited to be a part of MINECON!”
ADVERTISEMENT
Setup Timeout Error: Setup took longer than 30 seconds to complete.
Check out a full rundown of everything Minecon Earth over at the official site, the official launch trailer (featuring Arnett) above, and, for good measure, the best Bojack Horseman-inspired Minecraft video ever below.
Resogun creator Housemarque has earned a reputation as a specialist in digital-only game releases (its last hard copy release was 2012's Angry Birds Trilogy), but it's about to buck that trend. The studio has announced that its well-received, Smash TV-style PS4 arcade shooter Nex Machina will be available in a disc-based version through Limited Run Games on November 10th. There's a $30 standard edition if you just want something tangible, but the centerpiece is a $65 Collector's Edition that includes the soundtrack on CD, a poster and four art prints in a special edition box. Arguably, that's the version to get — if you want more than a download, you might as well get something truly memorable.
There's also a third edition with alternate cover art that will be exclusive to Sony's PlayStation Experience event in December.
Whichever version catches your eye, you'll need to move quickly. While the disc release isn't region-locked, there will only be a relatively small number of copies to go around (as suggested by the choice of Limited Run). This isn't so much a return to physical distribution as a nod to fans who want better memorabilia than a PSN purchase receipt.
Netflix's '80s-hued fantasy phenomenon Stranger Things has, in particularly timely fashion, made its way to Minecraft in the form of a new skins pack.
The Stranger Things Skins Pack, to give it its full name, launched earlier today on Xbox, PlayStation, Switch, and PC. Its arrival coincides with the release of Stranger Things' highly anticipated second season on Netflix.
“Hold onto your long blonde wigs, kids,” barked Minecraft developer Mojang as it celebrated the news, “because the whole cast is here! Break into a classified facility with Hopper, kick off some Dungeons and Dragons with Mike or heck, why not go totally telekinetic with Eleven?” There's even an announcement trailer if you fancy a game of ‘Guess which beloved Stranger Things character is represented by this particular collection of squares'.
For a complete list of characters included in the pack – there are over 50 skins in total, inspired by both seasons – you can visit the official Minecraft blog. However, Mojang does warn that there may be mild Season Two spoilers in there.
Anyone whose interests lie at the centre of the Venn diagram labelled “spooky '80s nostalgia” and “block-based survival” can pick up the Stranger Things Skin Pack for £2.49.
The excitement around Stranger Things season 2 has been building for months. We've seen soundtracks, merchandise and all kinds of promo tie-ins with other companies along the way. As the show returns this week, the buzz is already so high that reviews probably won't even matter — people will binge it anyway. It also helps that the first season was both really good and seemed to be really popular, despite the company not releasing any numbers. The Ringer takes a look at how Netflix creates the feeling of must-see TV even though we might not ever find out how popular its shows really are.
