Ghost hunting, pornography and interactive art: the weird afterlife of Xbox Kinect | Games

[Pelican Press 0]

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

Ghost hunting, ************ and interactive art: the weird afterlife of Xbox Kinect | Games

Released in 2010 and bundled with the Xbox 360, the Kinect looked like the future – for a brief moment, at least. A camera that could detect your gestures and replicate them on-screen in a game, the Kinect allowed players to control video games with their bodies. It was initially a sensation, selling 1m units in its first 10 days; it remains

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

.

However, a lack of games, unreliable performance and a motion-control market already monopolised by the Nintendo Wii caused enthusiasm for the Kinect to quickly cool.

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

released a new version of the Kinect with the Xbox One in 2013, only for it to become an embarrassing flop; the Kinect line was

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

. The Guardian reached out to multiple people involved in the development of the peripheral, all of whom declined to comment or did not wish to go on record. Instead, the people keenest to discuss

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

’s motion-sensing camera never used it for gaming at all.

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

is the co-founder of

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

, a creative studio specialising in interactive installations – many of which use depth cameras, including the Kinect. “When the Kinect came out, it really was like a dream situation,” he recalls. “We probably have 10+ installations around the world that have Kinects tracking people right now … The gaming use of the Kinect was a blip.”

Assistants demonstrate the game Kinect Adventures for Xbox 360 during a media briefing in 2010. Photograph: Mario Anzuoni / Reuters/Reuters

Watson speaks about the Kinect, which turns 15 this year, with rare relish. (“I cannot stop talking about depth cameras,” he adds. “It’s my passion.”) As part of the collaborative effort OpenKinect, Watson contributed to making

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

’s gaming camera open-source, building on the work of Hector “Marcan” Martin. It quickly became apparent that the Kinect would not, as

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

had initially hoped, be the future of video games. Instead, it was a gamechanger in other ways: for artists, roboticists and … ghost-hunters.

The Kinect functions on a structured light system, meaning it creates depth data by projecting an infrared dot cloud and reads the deformations in that matrix to discern depth. From this data, its machine learning core was trained to “see” the human body. In games such as Kinect Sports, this allowed the camera to transform the body into a controller. For people making interactive artwork, meanwhile, it cut out much of the programming and busywork necessitated by more basic infrared cameras.

“The best analogy would be like going from ******-and-white television to colour,” says Watson. “There was just this whole extra world that opened up for us.” Though high-powered depth cameras had existed before, retailing at about $6,000 (£4,740),

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

condensed that into a robust, lightweight device costing $150 (£118).

Robotocists were also grateful for an accessible sensor to grant their creations vision and movement. “Before it, only planar 2D Lidar information was available to detect obstacles and map environments,” says Walter Lucetti, a senior software engineer at

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

, which is soon to release the latest version of its advanced depth-sensing cameras and software. The 2D Lidar detects objects by projecting a laser and measuring the time the light takes to reflect back; the Kinect, however, could create a detailed and accurate depth map that provided more information on what the obstaclemay be and how to navigate it. “Before Kinect-like sensors,” Lucetti says, “a tuft of grass was not perceived differently from a rock, with all the consequences that entails for navigation.”

This type of depth camera now powers a host of autonomous robotics, including

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

, and Apple’s facial identification tech. (Apple bought PrimeSense, the Israeli company behind the Kinect’s structured light system, in 2013.)

Nasa’s Mars Perseverance Rover in 2020. Photograph: Nasa/UPI/REX/Shutterstock

The Kinect’s technology was soon eclipsed by freely available open-source sensors and more advanced motion-sensing devices. But since

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

ceased manufacture of the Kinect line in 2017, the little camera has enjoyed a spirited and not entirely un-troubled afterlife. It has

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

and worked on topography and patient alignment

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

; reports have emerged of it being used in airport baggage halls, as a

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

(United Airlines declined to comment on this), and even to

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

. It’s been attached to drones, rescue robots and even found a brief application in ************.

“I’m not sure anyone had a firm vision of what interactive sex involving the Kinect would be,” says Kyle Machulis, founder of

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

and another member of the OpenKinect team. The camera was deployed mostly as an over-complex controller for 3D sex games, fulfilling “more of a futurist marketing role than anything of actual consumer use,” Machulis says. In that role, it was successful: it attracted a flurry of attention, and threats from

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

to somehow ban porn involving Kinect. It was an interesting experiment, but it turned out that the addition of a novelty device was not a turn-on for many porn users. Besides, as Machulis says, when the camera malfunctions, “it looks pretty horrible.”

skip past newsletter promotion

Sign up to Pushing Buttons

Keza MacDonald’s weekly look at the world of gaming

Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain info about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. For more information see our Privacy Policy. We use

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

reCaptcha to protect our website and the

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

and

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

apply.

after newsletter promotion

Unreliability is of less concern for ghost hunters, who thrive on the ambiguity of ageing technology and who have rebranded the Kinect as the “SLS” (structured light sensor) camera. They deploy its body tracking to find figures the naked eye cannot see. Ghost hunters are thrilled by the Kinect’s habit of “seeing” bodies that aren’t really there, believing that these skeletal stick figures are representations of disembodied spirits.

The paranormal investigation industry doesn’t care much about false positives, so long as those false positives can be perceived as paranormal – which is just as well, says Jon Wood,

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

who has a show devoted to examining ghost hunting technology. “It’s quite normal for ghost hunters to be filming themselves in the dark, with infrared cameras and torches. You’re bathing the scene with IR light, while using a sensor that measures a specific pattern of infrared dots,” he says. Given that Kinect is designed specifically to recognise the human body in any data it receives, it would be stranger if the Kinect didn’t pick up anomalous figures in this context.

There’s a certain poetry in the Kinect living on among those searching for proof of life after death. In the right hands, the camera is still going strong. Theo Watson points me in the direction of

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

, an exhibition that has run in the New York Hall of Science since 2015. Of the many Kinect devices that power the installations, only two have had to be replaced in the decade since it opened – and one of those was only a few weeks ago. Watson started stockpiling the device when

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

ceased production.

“Half the projects on our website wouldn’t exist without the Kinect,” he says. “If we had this camera for another decade, we would still not run out of things to do with it.”

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

#Ghost #hunting #************ #interactive #art #weird #afterlife #Xbox #Kinect #Games

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up

This is the hidden content, please

• Sign In
• or
• Sign Up