Anyone remember Xbox Kinect? It was this strange-looking motion-sensing peripheral for the Xbox 360, and later Xbox One, which used a camera to track the gamer’s movements. First unveiled at E3 2009 as Project Natal, the demo centered around a character named Milo that the user could interact with in real-time, including on-the-fly generated responses, facial expression analysis, and more. But by its November 2010 release, Microsoft had dialed Kinect back to the rough equivalent of a webcam used to turn your body into a controller.
Kinect was basically Microsoft’s answer to what Nintendo did with the Wii, while Sony also had its own proprietary camera, called the PlayStation Eye, one of several forgotten PS3 features. So, by the 2010s, every console had a horse in the motion control race. Microsoft’s take on it, however, was sensational, becoming the fastest-selling gaming peripheral ever released.
Fast forward to 2025, and the Kinect has largely faded into obscurity as far as the Xbox is concerned. Microsoft discontinued the Kinect sensor in 2017, before ceasing production of its adapter in 2018. Kinect was, in reality, quite pioneering for its time, and the release of the Kinect SDK in 2011, followed by the open-source code, led to a range of non-gaming uses, including everything from creating art to allowing unmanned vehicles to navigate, from medical equipment to security cameras in the Korean DMZ. And while the hardware is dead, Microsoft didn’t abandon it — instead, the technology morphed into Azure Kinect DK, a more generalized format using the same principles. Let’s dive deeper and explore this quirky little camera and what it’s doing.
While it might seem simple on the outside — it’s a camera that lets you use your body to control a game — it’s actually quite complex if you think about it. How does Kinect know what’s your body and what isn’t? How can it detect your movement versus, say, a fan’s? In short, it operates in two stages: First, it uses a specialized camera to detect the room’s depth, from which it creates a 3D map, using a speckle of infrared laser light to reconstruct the room in its
XBOX Kinect Never Fully Died
