I recently stumbled upon a post that praised the Kinect as a great piece of tech and i read that it’s used currently in many fields other than gaming. Why so tho? I remember that it wasn’t so great playing with it and didn’t seem such a great deal
I recently stumbled upon a post that praised the Kinect as a great piece of tech and i read that it’s used currently in many fields other than gaming. Why so tho? I remember that it wasn’t so great playing with it and didn’t seem such a great deal
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If you have an iPhone or IPad with FaceID it uses the same tech. Apple bought the company that made it.
at the time it was one of the first consumer grade motion capture tools that did not require the fancy suits. It could tell a person or people from a background and capture their movements in digital space.
Basically what your iphone does now, the kinect was doing 15 years ago. And for the price of average consumer products.
It’s a device released 15 years ago that could allow skeletal tracking, motion anaylsis, depth perception and gesture recognition. To say it was ahead of its time would be a massive understatement. The competitors at the time all required you to hold a remote.
I worked with a shoe retailer that used kinects to monitor who would walk into the store, spend time looking at shoes, but then leave without buying. With that data, plus the skeleton tracking they were able to estimate the height and shoe size of the person and cross match it against stock levels. It allowed them to better tune the stock sizing they carried than just using the “this size sold out” approach.
At it’s core, the Kinect is a 3D camera. And all sorts of things like to have a 3D picture of what’s going on, from your phone camera to self driving cars. The biggest hurdle to that tech before was how expensive it was, but the Kinect got you something 90% as good as the professional equipment for 1/100th the price.
The problem wasn’t the Kinect hardware, it’s just that as a game controller, relying on body movements means you’re limited to the set of things a typical person could do in the space they have available in their home, and that’s much more limiting than having a controller with buttons and joysticks.