The Kinect’s days are officially numbered, as Microsoft is finally discontinuing their motion-sensing accessory for the Xbox.
Perhaps this has been a long time coming, despite the Kinects rise to popularity when it was announced back in 2009 (in part due to having no need for extra peripherals like the Wii and PlayStation Move) the device sadly didn’t get much content developed for it.
With the launch of the Xbox One, Microsoft also updated the Kinect and bundled it together. However, this jacked up the overall price of the bundle and contributed to a lot fewer sales than Microsoft would have liked. In the end, Microsoft unbundled the Kinect from the Xbox One but it was too late for the Kinect.
But this isn’t quite the end for Microsoft’s motion tracking projects, with HoloLens and Windows Mixed Reality in the works. But if you truly miss the Kinect, the company behind the sensors, PrimeSense, was acquired by Apple and is likely behind the FaceID camera system on Apple’s iPhoneX, so it technically still lives on, though in a slightly different form.
