The Kinect is impressive for how high tech it is.
The Wiimote and sensor bar is impressive for how low tech it is.
PlayStation Move existed.
To be fair, the six-axis movement of the Move controllers was obviously impressive and a seemed to be a precursor to almost all VR controllers.
So, the Kinect got a last minute change from corporate MS that completely ruined the device.
The Kinect SDK is insanely fast, accurate, and fun to use. This is because all of the processing for the IR and depth sensors/etc. was done on the physical Kinect device itself. it has its own processor to handle all of that. And it was lightning fast for what it needed to be. Imagine a kinect that instantly tracks your movements with sub-ms latency/lag. That’s what the Kinect was supposed to be, and the SDK version of it was.
When they made the production/commercial version of it, someone high up without understanding the product thought that people would be able to hack into the Kinect and exploit it to steal MS’s trade secrets and code for how it works if they could get access to the onboard CPU and memory of the device.
So they moved the processing for all the sensors into the XBox mainboard/CPU. This was further limited by a paltry amount of CPU/RAM given to any peripheral device so the rest could remain reserved for the game itself.
This completely ruined the device. It couldn’t help but be laggy as fuck. it barely had any processing/compute time to handle the sensor data in a timely fashion.
Once again proving that corporate MBA fucks don’t know what they’re doing and shouldn’t ever be allowed to tell engineers what to do or how to do it.
Edit: Developed a few custom games and products with the Kinect SDK over Unity3D and it was blazingly fast. This is how I know all this after doing some digging/research as to why the SDK experience was so wildly different from the commercial version.
I was in the industry for nearly a decade and have witnessed so many similar situations. Hadn’t heard about this one though, thanks for sharing. I was around in those days and was super excited about the Kinect but we didn’t make anything in house with it so I never got the opportunity to see it function properly.
It’s one of the reasons Lionhead had to cancel the “Milo” game they showed off with the Kinect announcement. Without the on-board processing, the stuff they had already built couldn’t run.
This incident made his decision to euthanise his wife far more easier
playing skyrim with kinect was genuinely the best way to play the game
I only remember it allowed you to speak shouts. While interesting use, memorizing made up words was not on my list of fun.
magic sucks because I can’t remember the words.
what a barbarian thing to say.
/s
too immersive for some i guess. made me feel like the real dragonborn
So, the fact they could have done this with any mic you plug in but didn’t, is just too immersive? You’re totally right.
im not sure what youre trying to say
Any mic could have been used to allow us to voice shouts. But they chose to lock that behind an $80 device. By supporting that you support locking game mechanics behind dongles. That’s not immersion no matter how you spin it.
I’ll come back and add if Bethesda would have released that mechanic to all mics, we all would be speaking dovakin like trekies speak klingon. That would have added to the immersion by bringing the game language to life. As is, it was a marketing ploy that only worked on those that had already bought the device. It was not marketed well, by forcing purchase of a new peice of equipment instead of allowing all to access the program, it was never allowed into the actually gaming zeitgeist past a niche novelty.(again speaking of the language not the poorly conceived connect device) See, the actual device and the program that patches skyrim are actually not the same thing. They just locked the program to only slave for that one $80 device. Yes. Very immersive.
so…why havent they done it again?
only other games i even know of that utilize a mic in that way are guitar hero, rock band, and that alien game. but they just detect pitch and sound not specific words
Seaman on the Dreamcast when it launched was pretty crazy.
It came with the mic when you bought it.
Good question. I honestly have no clue. It’s ridiculous we can talk to NPC’s at this point with our actual voice.
I mean they have mods to add the Voice Activated Shouts to any nexus mod manager. Why is it that Bethesda relies on mods to correct their crap games?
They’re saying that you’re saying the input device was what made it immersive and not the language. What a silly thing for you to say, come on.
not at all what i said but okay. what a silly comment to make, come on
It wasn’t silly. You literally think the konict was the immersive part.
Sorry hit reply to the wrong person 😅 and yes, this☝️
I should’ve added a /s!
Skyrim actually supported a load of commands . And it worked pretty reliably with my weird foreign accent.
(Ekvip duul wepöns. …Ekvip bou. Kvik seiv.)
It actually made sense to use those a lot of times. I felt it went way past the gimmick territory!
Some of the Mass Effect games also let you issue squad commands through Kinect. It was handy.
I don’t know, I always found it pretty fun on my Xbox 360.
The game where you patch the water
This must be a meme from deep down the nostalgia box
Wdym it was awesome
