This Week in Retro: Kinect [2010] (Patreon)

November 4, 2010: Microsoft Invites Gamers to Stand Up and MOVE (to a larger home)

by Diamond Feit

Did the Nintendo Wii really debut just 14 years ago? Nintendo's fortunes have risen and fallen so many times already this century, the Wii phenomenon feels like it was something from my youth. But no: I was a full-grown adult when the tiny white console became the world’s hottest product.

What made the Wii huge, metaphorically speaking, was its appeal to a mass audience outside of typical video game fans. The Wii was “high concept” incarnate. No one had to explain the tech to anyone, as both its function and capabilities were obvious at a glance. Users could point the controller at the TV and select what they wanted. They could swing, shake, or steer that same stick to play games. Hence, despite its standard-definition graphics, it handily outsold its high-definition competition made by Microsoft and Sony.

Microsoft and Sony didn't care much for that, and they didn’t take it lying down. Both electronics behemoths moved forward quickly, each with their own respective adaptation of the Wii's motion-based controls, with the ultimate hope of luring those elusive "casual" video game fans over to their console's corner. In Sony’s case, this effort took the form of PlayStation Move, a device so similar to the Nintendo Wii's controller that there's almost nothing to say about it. Yes, I bought one. Yes, it worked. No, the games were not especially memorable outside of Pixeljunk 4AM. But Microsoft went in a different direction, and 10 years ago launched a product with no controller at all: Project Natal, better known by its final release name, Kinect.

Alright, that's not fair. With Kinect, Microsoft's ad copy had a consistent message: "You are the controller." The Kinect is a camera that plugs into the back of an Xbox 360 console and scans the room for human bodies. While in view of the camera, a player's every gesture and motion is transmitted to the console. This set it apart from the Wii and the Move, which required players to hold a controller like a baseball bat, tennis racquet, or beam katana in order to play a game. Kinect removes the need for holding any objects at all, opening the door to a wider range of activities. Anything a person could do with their bodies—not just swinging or shaking a stick—had the potential to be translated into the game.

Kinect isn't merely a camera, though. It also includes a microphone, which enables players to use voice commands. In 2020, we have become inundated with A.I.-powered assistants that can answer our questions or turn on devices in our house, but 10 years ago the idea that consumers could talk to their home electronics seemed a lot more radical. Adding voice commands to the Xbox had ramifications beyond gaming alone; after all, the console was already known for hosting a variety of non-gaming applications, such as streaming video. Instead of searching for a remote, Xbox owners could now simply ask Kinect to "go to Netflix" and "play The Dark Knight."

From an elevator-pitch standpoint, Kinect sounded like the most seamless interface possible. No controller meant no batteries, no broken televisions, and a near-infinite range of motions. Whether you played video games all the time or had never touched a console before, there would be no button configurations to stumble over—after all, there were no buttons to configure. Adding the voice command option to all of this was simply gravy; neither Nintendo nor Sony offered anything comparable on their consoles. Kinect looked like the future, and it was a Microsoft exclusive.

Unfortunately, delivering the future is never an easy proposition, and while Kinect did sell well, the device struggled with a few unique hurdles that the competition did not. By nature of its reliance on a camera, Kinect requires players to stand in full view of the device, a directive that contrasts with the established tendency for most video game players to sit down and relax as they play. There's also the matter of those two little words "full view": The Kinect needs to see a player's entire body (or even two players' bodies) in order to function. This means that the recommended distance between the Kinect and the user was six to eight feet (182-244 cm) at launch, though later models narrowed that to just four to six feet. Either way, that’s a lot of mandatory empty space between a console and its user, a requirement that proved infeasible for many Xbox 360 owners with small living rooms—myself included. And I live in a house, not an apartment.

Even without the issue of space, Kinect users have to contend with another problem: Motion controls always have limits. A human can theoretically spend hours playing an action game or an RPG while seated comfortably and tapping buttons periodically. Performing sustained physical action, which Kinect demands, cuts down on the amount of time players can enjoy their game before taking a break or bowing out entirely. There's also the question of which actions should players be tasked with performing over and over; running in place to control Sonic the Hedgehog or jumping to make Mario jump would be exhausting.

Kinect also faces still another natural hurdle: It takes more time for a person to move an entire limb than it does to press a button, and it also takes time for Kinect to see that motion and translate it into the corresponding input than to read a button switch’s activation. These compound delays, though measured in microseconds, result in a noticeable difference in response time between gesture controls and traditional controls. This meant that developers either had to slow the action to allow for Kinect's input latency or else come up with a new kind of gameplay experience that would be a better fit for the peripheral. Hence the glut of Kinect games which focus on fitness, dancing, or mini-game collections (which involved lots of frantic flailing).

Microsoft had a lot of faith in Kinect, and the device’s strong sales convinced the company their faith was well-founded. At the 2013 announcement of Xbox One, Microsoft revealed Kinect would no longer be an optional add-on but rather a required component, so that "game and entertainment creators can build experiences that assume the availability of voice, gesture and natural sensing." Months later, this message was clarified to something less drastic (“the console will still function if Kinect isn’t plugged in"). But by that point, Microsoft’s most radical decision could not be walked back: The camera would be bundled with every unit sold at launch whether consumers wanted it or not, thus raising the price of the Xbox One above that of the PlayStation 4.

Microsoft would yield within the year, shipping Xbox One consoles that did not include Kinect, but by then the damage had been done. Kinect became an albatross: A device capable of doing things no other console could, but the audience for these alternate experiences turned out to be smaller than anticipated. When Kinect was finally discontinued in 2017, only 48 games on Xbox One supported the device, even though it had initially been presented as integral to the machine.

There's a funny addendum to this story, one that forced me to write most sentences in this column in the present tense. While Kinect was discontinued as an Xbox peripheral, Microsoft still supports the device for other platforms. To this day, when I see a motion-based arcade game or an interactive display in a shopping mall, I always search for the electronic eye that makes it work. More often than not, I see a Kinect behind it all. In March of this year, Microsoft released the Azure Kinect, a "cutting-edge spatial computing developer kit" targeted at "manufacturing, retail, healthcare, and media enterprises." The device has shrunk in size in the decade since its initial release, making it look more like Eve than WALL-E, but somewhere inside that futuristic-looking case are the same guts that helped Xbox owners look at the bottom of their avatar's shoe.

Yet I cannot dismiss Kinect as folly, or even as a Wii wannabee. When it worked, it had an immediate grip on players that no amount of controller-shaking could match. I'll never forget watching a Japanese salaryman named Yoshida completely invert his body busting a move on the Tokyo Game Show floor in 2011, only for him to tell me he doesn't own an Xbox because "there are no games I want for it." I can also remember how much my son enjoyed playing Fruit Ninja on our big-screen TV at home, even if I also remember how long it took me to pull said television into a different position just to get Kinect to see him at all. And while the Kinect lineup was infamous for ho-hum games that asked players to exercise or shout menu commands, there were exceptions like Swery65's Dark Dreams Don't Die, an adventure game whose motion controls were just as innovative as its storytelling.

If Kinect was a failure, it was a failure of corporate thinking. Microsoft spent big bucks to develop and release the futuristic device, and consumers responded with interest. Somehow that led Microsoft to bet that every single consumer around the world had to have a Kinect, and the Xbox One paid the price for that bet by falling into a distant third in the modern console race. But as long as consumers dream of fully-immersive gaming, they will be forever curious about motion controls, voice commands, and interfaces that don't revolve around buttons or joysticks. Kinect cannot provide that level of immersion in our present, but who knows about the future? Maybe every time the holodeck malfunctioned on Star Trek there was a tiny 24th-century Microsoft-made camera to blame.

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan and is an active Twitter user.