Hackers have been hooking up their Kinect devices to their Windows PCs since shortly after Microsoft released the wildly popular Xbox accessory in 2010, but today Steve Balmer made it official, using his final CES keynote address to announce Kinect for Windows.

Kinect is arguably the coolest innovation to come out of Redmond since… um… well, I can’t think of a cooler innovation to come out of Redmond. Now, with Microsoft-sanctioned drivers and a developer kit in hand, it will be fascinating to see what developers do with Kinect’s advanced motion-sensing technology.

16 replies on “Microsoft Officially Unveils Kinect for Windows”

  1. It’s a move to head off Apple’s iTV which is a Siri-like equipped TV that is voice controlled.

    By the way, recorded data from the Kinect is admissable as evidence in all capital crimes, if you didn’t know that already, and will be gathered by police.

    Welcome to Big Brother!

  5. Originally not the invention of Microsoft. They bought the technology from some Israeli company that was shopping it around. They first went to Apple, but they made the group sign a few NDAs just to talk about it before making an offer. They didnt like that idea, wanted to sell to the highest bidder, so they gave Apple the finger and sold to MS.

    People are already used to using their hands to change the channel, fast forward, ect. I dont see many people migrating to a system Siris where they have to speak to change the channel. Also Siri requires an internet connection, without it, it flat out doesnt work, whereas Kinect doesnt need one to operate.

  6. @2 I had the alpha. Power drain was too high, license fees to Nintendo and others too high, hurt your head too much in the target market. Glad they killed it. So they went with a different model (originally the iPad Portable) as the iPad3.

    You must be new to product development. A 50 percent success rate from alpha on consumer devices is actually quite high.

    Siri as used in the iTV does not need an active Net connect, just stores the DB on the device in the VOD DVR storage space. You get a smaller subset hit when not connected, but for choosing which shows and movies to watch it churns out more than 98 percent hit rate success.

    I’m still waiting for day 2 and the 3D Printers for Home.

  8. DVR isnt going to happen with AppleTV because the skyrocketing cost of hard disk drives due to flooding in Taiwan and Apple is heavily invested in SSDs, which cost way more. A 320 gig SSD doesnt get you much in DVR space. While you could store a small database for Siri on the local drive, Apple does use Yelp for when you ask questions like “Wheres the nearest psychotherapist in Seattle?”, it will sit there and do nothing, anything beyond video controls would absolutely need an internet connection.

    3D Printers you can buy today, they just cost 2,000$

  10. I’m just waiting for motion-sensing controllers to have a consistent input paradigm… one better than haphazard translations of point-and-click with no buttons to click.

  11. @6: “You must be new to product development.”

    Please stop with these dumb appeals to authority as a way of appearing more knowledgeable about technology, they’re groanworthy.

  12. @11, beyond groanworthy. By the tenth or twentieth time, they’re ASSAULT-worthy.

    @8, the flooding of the hard drive factories was in Thailand, not Taiwan, but point taken.

  14. Having an Xbox 360 with both kinect and voice dashboard control, the voice control is WAY MORE USEFUL. In a room with more then one person, or a cat, Kinect becomes useless for any sort of fine control and you end up waving your hands around like an idiot trying to get it’s attention however a simple “xbox next episode” works the first time.

    This may just be a software problem, but speaking is much faster.

  15. @13, you realize that Will is the sort of person who flips through Wired Magazine at the barber’s and thinks that makes him part of the “product development cycle”.

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