Should i buy kinect

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Thanks a lot, Jacques. This is the one that I will get:. Hello, This one is the Kinect 2. You need the Microsoft Kinect 2. A slow but steady trickle of Kinect games came out over the following months, but a lot of them fell into the "family entertainment" or "fitness trainer" veins, far from the core gamer demographic that made up most of the Xbox owning audience.

Worse, a lot of the titles got poor reviews , alienating those many who bought an Xbox just to play Kinect games. Microsoft convinced a lot of larger publishers of marquee franchise games to integrate Kinect features into their gameplay, but they were largely gimmicky — I'll never forget the time my friend got a red card in "FIFA 15" soccer for the Xbox because the Kinect's microphone caught him swearing.

We asked a former Xbox insider familiar with the development of the Kinect why it was so hard to find any good games that did cool things with the sensor. The simple answer is that the best of the best developers simply weren't interested because they had invested so much in making their existing, lucrative, big-budget franchises work frighteningly well with a traditional controller.

In other words, even if top-tier developers thought it was cool, they weren't going to blow the time and budget to make it work with their existing games.

Plus, you didn't need a Kinect to play those games, so many players likely didn't even know there was any integration in those games at all. At the same time, circa the early s, those developers who were best suited to creating really new, innovative games for non-gaming crowds were starting to shift their efforts toward the iPhone and Android platforms, where there was cash and a rapidly growing audience to be found, the insider says.

The Kinect also introduced voice commands and a gesture interface to the Xbox itself. You could pause a movie with your voice, or log in to your account on the console by standing in front of the camera. But as cool as that all sounded, the Kinect was still a new technology, and there were some glitches with those cool new interface tricks. Worse, the longer people used Kinect, the more they found places and situations where it just fell short and didn't work as well as it should have.

In my apartment, playing a Kinect game requires moving furniture around to give the sensor the field of view that it needs to work well. It's a big problem for lots of gamers, since you need 6 to 10 feet between you and the sensor. Meanwhile, you can sit on a couch in a room of any size and play a more traditional video game. Despite these pros, Kinect adoption was fairly strong, at least partially because Microsoft was pushing it as part of those bundles with the wildly popular Xbox console.

But not every Xbox owner took the plunge: In January , Microsoft announced that it had sold 18 million Kinects versus 66 million total Xbox consoles. A year after later, in February , Microsoft Xbox community relations head Larry Hryb announced on Twitter that the company had sold 24 million Kinects for million-plus Xbox consoles, which suggests — but doesn't prove — that most of them were sold bundled with the console.

When the Xbox One was first introduced in November , Microsoft made the shocking announcement that the new console would come with and require a new version of the Kinect sensor. Plus, it shipped with Bing-powered search and the Internet Explorer browser preinstalled. For Microsoft, it was all part of its long-time ambition to place a computer in the living room.

With the Kinect, Microsoft thought it had made a user-friendly multimedia hub with a natural interface that anybody could use for both games and media. The Xbox One's core gamer demographic hated the idea.

When the Xbox One hit the market in November , it was quickly outsold by the cheaper PlayStation 4 for months after its launch. At one point, the PlayStation 4 outsold the Xbox One at a factor of 3 to 1. That early lead means PlayStation 4 still dominates the Xbox One in sales. Microsoft refused to relent and doubled down on its message that the Kinect was the future. Furthermore, the actual Kinect for Xbox One sensor itself turned out to only be a minor improvement on the first, with some new, but still gimmicky, integrations with the interface.

For instance, you could take a screenshot in a game by asking the Kinect, nicely, to do so. Published by Microsoft, it was going to be a big, if belated, showcase for what the new Kinect could do.

It was a big bet for the company, with a team of working on the title. Instead, it ended up wildly underselling, ultimately getting written off as a massive loss that led to layoffs at developer studio Rare, according to reports at the time.

The move has significantly helped Xbox One's sales, and the gap between it and the leading Sony PlayStation 4 is getting smaller by the quarter.

But it meant that the estimated 5 million Xbox One owners who had bought their console before the Kinect unbundling were stuck with an accessory they didn't necessarily want in the first place.

Meanwhile, only a handful of games support Kinect for Xbox One at all, and of those only a few received decent reviews. And with the novelty gone after the first generation of Kinect for Xbox , even the most optimistic Xbox fans were out of patience with the device. The article's author noted that no new big flagship games had been announced for the Kinect for Xbox One — not even from Microsoft itself.

That remained true for the rest of the lifetime of the Kinect. That adapter was, in turn, officially discontinued at the end of In other words, it really seems like Kinect had been swept under a rug, even before the official discontinuation. Its nifty motion-tracking tech has a ton of other applications.

In the Kinect dashboard, you can sometimes talk and have your speech recognized, but other times, it's only hand motions, and in a few surprising times, you'll need the controller. Also, while the Microsoft ads talk about using the Kinect to swipe your hand and play videos, those are only videos you've purchased and downloaded through the Zune store, itself a completely modal interface separate from the modal interface of the Kinect hub, and that a separate interface from the Xbox dashboard.

If you want to play videos from a connected Windows Media device, they're only accessible through the main dashboard's video interface -- and not using the Kinect. Finally, while you can start the Xbox, get into the Kinect dashboard, and play something like Kinect Adventures without ever touching a controller, there's no way to turn off the Xbox without physically tapping it or holding down the X button on the controller.

This was not just because I'm a dedicated product tester. Oh, no. This was because Microsoft set out to make me go insane. I decided I wanted a Kinect. I didn't really want to play it all that much I figured my wife would , but as a computer scientist, I wanted to see this truly new input device in action. So I decided I'd buy a Kinect.

I bought it, brought it home, and connected it kinected it? This is where we discovered our great room wasn't great enough to house the Kinect. Plan B.

We have a spare, almost empty bedroom my wife uses for yoga. It's a room big enough and empty enough for the Kinect to be used safely. I also had an old, white, pre-HDMI Xbox we sometimes used upstairs, and we decided to bring that down and use it with the Kinect. We turned it on and the darned thing red-ringed. We did all the repair tricks. None of them worked. The white Xbox was dead.

But this was a project I was doing for science and country. It pained me, but we would have to buy one of those new-fangled super-slick Xbox s that came with the GB drive. Life is hard. I'd get the new Xbox for the entertainment center, and my wife would get the Elite with a smaller drive for the yoga room.

This did not work out as planned. As I documented in the Xbox Kinect Bundle unboxing , the bundle doesn't come with a critical and, of course, non-standard cable necessary to kinect the Kinect to the old-style Xbox What's worse, at least as of this week, Microsoft has no plans to make such a cable available separately.

So she got the slick new Xbox and I didn't. For the final indignity, when I unboxed the Xbox bundle , I discovered the thing only came with crappy RCA cables.

No HDMI. In my mind, the lack of the HDMI cable just added insult to injury. Next: Reasons 7 and 8 ». Reason 7: What if your stupid, embarrassing, jumping pictures wind up on Facebook? The Kinect in either variation comes with a cute, free game called Kinect Adventures. It's really a demo game, but it's a good , engaging demo game.

There's only one problem. Your embarrassing pictures could wind up on the Internet. Here's what happens. As you play a level in Kinect Adventures, the Kinect snaps a number of silly, digital camera images, generally of places where you're jumping or squatting. At the end of the level, it shows you those pictures.