It's all official, Microsoft's Xbox Kinect is the fastest selling consumer electronics device ever. According to the people at the Guinness World Records, Microsoft's Kinect sold on average 133,333 units per day over a 60 day period. That totals a mind-boggling 8 million units in two months.
Let's not get too carried away yet folks, but Engadget reports that Microsoft is now beginning to hire new staff that could point toward development on a new Xbox 360 replacement.
Every-so-often an iOS app crosses our collective Redmond Pie radar that reminds us just why we love mobile devices so much. Today's little gem is everyAir, developed by Pandaelf.
Engadget today has announced winners of the 2010 Engadget Editor’s Choice Awards. And not so surprisingly, just like their Readers’ Choice Awards, iPhone 4 has bagged “Phone of the Year” award, iPad is awarded as “Gadget of the Year” while Microsoft’s Kinect has been awarded with both “Peripheral of the Year” and “Game Accessory of the Year” award.
Already a key part of any Android user's arsenal, DoubleTwist's AirSync has provided wireless media syncing for Google's mobile platform for a good while now, plugging a gap created by not anchoring the platform to a desktop client as Apple did with iOS and iTunes. Now, according to TNW, DoubleTwist has upped the ante by adding AirTwist, ala iOS’ AirPlay, making Android devices act as a standalone media server.
Microsoft’s Chief Executive, Steve Ballmer, announced today that they managed to sell over 8 million Kinect units in just 60 days since launch. This figure of course has significantly outpaced the 5 million units the company had expected to sell in 2010.
The year 2010 is now coming to a close. Since I got to play with many different gadgets, I thought it will be nice if I summarized a list of my personal favorites from the year 2010.
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.
