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.

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.

Actually it is fantastic for 3D scanning: cheap and does the trick. If you want to gift me one, feel free.

I always thought that the Kinect was great , extremely fun , with a few limited games

The wii was great too , a bit "clunky" ,

But from the get go the proposition isnt as universal as playing a game the normal way ,

We have the original Kinect and an old Xbox 360 permanently stationed in the living room of the house.

Being able to have Kinect Party or its prequel (Double Fine's Happy Action Theater) on the TV out there is absolute magic when you need to entertain a group of kids.

They should've stuck it out with it included in the xbone. Offering a cheaper version without one split the playerbase and made development of any kinect features in Xbox exclusives infeasible.

This is why he spoiler spoiler right before the start of Silent Hill 2.

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

Nah I loved it. Was great for watching videos

I don't know, I always found it pretty fun on my Xbox 360.

This must be a meme from deep down the nostalgia box

Wdym it was awesome