Microsoft has discontinued the Kinect.

mc_monte

It seems that after seven years of awesome, Microsoft has decided to discontinue manufacturing the Kinect.

Many of us were still working with the original Kinect 1 devices, which have been long discontinued.

See this article for more details.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/...

The Kinect was a hugely important device for me as an artist, and really defined a lot of my work -- and led to a lot of amazing collaborations over the years. Sad to see it die, though there will certainly be a long afterlife as we continue to find ways to use these devices in new work.

Remember, for anyone interested in using these devices in your work that doesn't own one yet, before you go to the Internet, check your local used video game shop. Often, Kinects are found in bargain bins for super cheap. I got a bunch of Kinect 1 devices a few years ago for $20 Canadian each at a local GameStop.

Juriaan

Sadly the adapter that is required to make the Kinect V2 work is not found in the regular game shop.. :(

dbini

@Juriaan - it is in Finland - I got my last one from an electronics store - cheaper and quicker than ebay.

mark_m

@Juriaan

Still available from Amazon.... I just bought a spare!

bonemap

Hi,

It has been suggested to me that the Kinect for xBox 360 has a greater depth tracking range than the Kinect for xBox One, can anyone verify that?

Also has anyone been able to use the face tracking features of xBox One with Isadora?

I have just acquired an Kinect for xBox One and have done only preliminary motion capture tests but there does appear to be some improvement in the quality of skeleton tracking over the Kinect 360. Has anyone made a definitive comparison?

I was thinking a similar way to the article linked in this thread in regard to Apple's release of a depth camera w/ face tracking in the iPhone X device. However, There is at least one major difference and that is the cost, a Kinect goes for a few bucks and the iPhone will be over a thousand and likely to have a much shorter working life.

regards

bonemap

Skulpture

@bonemap said:

Hi,
It has been suggested to me that the Kinect for xBox 360 has a greater depth tracking range than the Kinect for xBox One, can anyone verify that?
Also has anyone been able to use the face tracking features of xBox One with Isadora?
I have just acquired an Kinect for xBox One and have done only preliminary motion capture tests but there does appear to be some improvement in the quality of skeleton tracking over the Kinect 360. Has anyone made a definitive comparison?
I was thinking a similar way to the article linked in this thread in regard to Apple's release of a depth camera w/ face tracking in the iPhone X device. However, There is at least one major difference and that is the cost, a Kinect goes for a few bucks and the iPhone will be over a thousand and likely to have a much shorter working life.
regards
bonemap

"It has been suggested to me that the Kinect for xBox 360 has a greater depth tracking range than the Kinect for xBox One, can anyone verify that?"

I had some students ask me about this literally a few days ago. I need to research it. I have never fully researched the tech spec of each device - but I need to.

Skulpture

^ I've sent a few emails to some people who might be able to give me information.

mark

Dear All,

We are actively investigating the Orbbec line of devices for future support of this kind of thing. @DusX and @Michel have one, and we're going to write a plugin if we find that they work well. We also are also preparing another nice addition to the tracking "toolbox" under developement, but we'll keep little tidbit under wraps until we're sure it's going to actually work. ;-)

Warm Wishes,
Mark

Maximortal

@Skulpture i got booth kenects and I'm my experience the difference is this: 306 is less precise but start to "feel" human presence deeper. One version start to out put something only when a full and good skeleton is tracked so this means only when the subject is a bit near than 360 version

bonemap

@mark said:

We are actively investigating the Orbbec line of devices

Thanks for the advice. It could tip the rest of us into switching to Windows if Mac drivers do not become available !

It must be hard to make a call like that as the viability of these devices have a history of being undermined by the big players - Apple buying out PrimeSense and then discontinuing the device is a prime (no pun intended) example. The Kinect coming from a giant like Microsoft felt like a very stable proposition. Which begs the question how can a small company make it work when the larger one (who owns all the development IP) can not?

cheers

bonemap

mark

@bonemap

This from a discussion on FB about the topic, from Nick Fox-Gieg who used to be at Google Creative Lab; It's a Kinect v1 clone, started by some ex-MS folks--they're serious." That's encouraging to hear and gives me some hope, as I think Nick knows what he's talking about. They have to be jumping with joy (as a company) that Microsoft killed the Kinnect – it's a great opportunity for them.

Best,
M

bonemap

@mark said:

it's a great opportunity for them

Agreed.

cheers

bonemap

Aolis

Hi there,

Hoping for an update about the development of an actor for the Orbbec.

I have just returned from USITT and the interest for this type of sensing is still in very high demand esp. in the Sub-Blacktrax/academic theatre world.

I know that they have yet to provide an SDK for the OSX platform for their joint sensing - but even being able to simply catch the depth and RGB sensor's image outputs would be be amazing.

I will also make sure to submit a formal feature request.

Hope all is well!

Best,

Alex O.

DusX

@aolis

Thank you for the input. I have a partially working plug in. The sdk is constantly changing so it's a work in progress. We expect an update to the mac sdk sometime soon. Our hope is to bring you a cross platform plug in asap.

Fred

@mark please think about intel realsense instead or as well. Orbec SDK is pretty disfunctional and the future may not be too bright for them after such dissapointment. Realsense is a growing and evolving platform with a lot more behind it and an open SDK that suports multiple cameras, depth, colour and soon skeleton (or now if you want to hook it up with openNI).

mark_m

@fred said:

@mark please think about intel realsense instead or as well.

Just agreeing with Fred here, and seconding his request for Intel Realsense support in Isadora.

mark

@fred said:

please think about intel realsense instead or as well.

I will. Went to go buy one and they are backordered. Are there any sources except Intel?

But when you say "after such disappointment" do you mean the SDK? Or?

Best Wishes,
Mark

Fred

@mark As far as I know it is all backorder. The dissapointment was with performance vs specs, it gets 7fps with depth and colour at the same time, as far as I know having both streams is still problematic, resource use is pretty high so far as well. It also looks like they are focusing on ROS (robot operating system) only, there are no commits for 2 years on the astra github but a lot of activity on the ROS driver.

DusX

@fred

Being that it uses usb2 I don't think there will ever be great multi stream support. Especially with the Astra pro since it's color camera is higher definition.

Running the depth stream and the body tracking I get 30fps in my tests. The plugin runs in a separate thread so it doesn't effect izzy heavily and seems pretty useful.

To me the Astra with body tracking seems like a great Kinect v1 replacement.

Orbbec offers a body shapes/cutouts stream (B&W body masks) as well. That is the next element I am looking at getting to work. It could be very useful for Eyes.

I would be interested in seeing how the real sense runs and what is offered in the sdk. I expect they don't provide much processing and something like opencv would need to be added on top for different use cases.

SlaviG

Hi,

For sure, I will consider investing money into any new scanner, based on what Isadora will support.

Looking forward towards any news on the topic.

Regards,
S.