The weekend of December 11th saw Microsoft’s Kinect for Xbox 360 surpass the 4 million unit sales mark for its motion sensing peripheral. If current sales trends stay constant, Microsoft will be on track to sell 6 million units before the year is through, which is 1 million more than their prediction before release. This bodes extremely well for the future of the Kinect gaming technology and even more so for the potential of great titles that will be released.
If you have played with Kinect, you will recognize the similarity between Kinect and the user interface innovations that were imagined in the Tom Cruise starrer Minority Report movie back in 2002.
Microsoft’s Xbox 360 Kinect hacks have been plentiful, but here is a very original one that is almost guaranteed to impress. A Japanese coder by the name of Takayuki Fukatsu posted a video showing Kinect's "optical camouflage" effect that he created with openFrameworks. He didn't explain how it works but it appears to be a filter that removes his body from the frame in real time and replacing it with the image behind, which would have been taken beforehand. The mismatch of the images near his outlines are a good indication its a before image being replaced over the top of the current one.
Microsoft Xbox 360 Kinect sales has surprised the world of gaming, with the latest figures suggesting the sales rates of the Kinect have now surpassed that of the Apple iPad and Nintendo Wii console. Microsoft’s goal for the end of the year is 5 million units, after selling 2.5 million units in 25 days we would say they are well on there way.
There's a new TV set to be in town and the brains behind it are confident or at least preparing hard to give Apple TV and the Google TV a tough challenge. We are talking about the rumors associated to Microsoft's own TV subscription in the pipeline.
Two heads are better then one and the same can be applied to two Kinect units. Now what good sort of gaming quality would the two Kinect units provide when paired together is another story but Oliver Kreylos has paired them for a different purpose. Kreylos released a video recently demonstrating the two paired Kinects, the output being meshed to add a different dimension to Microsoft's gaming device.
After selling 1.3 Million units in first 10 days of launch, Microsoft today has announced that they have managed to sold over 2.5 Million Kinect for Xbox 360 units worldwide in just 25 days since launch. Full press release is as follows.
The first user-friendly Windows Phone 7 jailbreak has been released. Its called ChevronWP7 and it has been developed by well known and respected Microsoft community enthusiasts Rafael Rivera, Long Zheng and Chris Walsh.
Ever since the open source drivers were released for the Xbox 360 Kinect, there has been a surge in hackers using it for a whole range of different applications. The potential of the impressive hardware was seen by Chris Rojas who created a new processing app which takes the distance data and renders objects in neon cubes, where the size of the cube is based on the object's distance from the sensor.
October figures from the NPD group states that the Xbox 360 has been the best selling console in the U.S. for the fifth month straight, with an impressive 325,000 units sold, compared to the PlayStation 3's 250,000 and the Nintendo Wii’s 232,000. Microsoft boasts total sales of 3.5 million units to date having been the only console to sell more units each successive year.
