As I understand it, the range on Kinect 2 will be decreased. I think it's also targeted less towards gaming and more towards plugging it into your PC and developing awesome things for it.viranimus said:In other news... No one is interested because it is common knowledge that the game lineup is completely insufficient to justify a 100$ add on.
Honestly, I think MS would have done so much better with this and kept this in development (edit: do a few things like decrease the range) until the next console, add it as a standard part of the console, and spent the last 2 years and next year allowing the developers free time to fully experiement with it and come out the gate swinging with it, instead of the whimper it has been for the last year.
MS I am disappoint.
It has a lot of potential. There are a lot of companies and universities that are working on computer vision. They do things like surveillance, human behavior analysis, (product) inspection, obstacle avoidance (e.g. for robots), and many more things. The third dimension adds a whole lot of information that can make these things easier. It was possible, but non-trivial to get good 3D info before, but the Kinect does it easily, is fairly accurate (albeit in a limited range), very fast and ridiculously cheap (price cut or not).vxicepickxv said:Nope. Europe one this one.Marshall Honorof said:On the other hand, they did get Pandora's Tower [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandora's_Tower], so maybe we can call this one a draw.
While I can't say that I'm upset about the price drop, I still wonder how much more potential the SDK for the Kinect has. I know one of the things I'm reading about is replacing larger and more expensive medical technology involved with diagnosis of joint injuries with the Kinect, but I haven't heard much on that in a while.
I could probably use it as a security system or spyware device with little to no work.
To be honest, I don't fully understand why they made it primarily a gaming peripheral. If they hadn't, they could probably have sold it for literally 10 times the price if they hadn't, and everybody would have thought it was a wondrous and still cheap piece of technology, instead of a stupid gimmick. On the other hand, they probably would have sold less units, so perhaps this was the best decision.