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During their CES keynote, Microsoft mentioned their launch of Kinect for Windows. Now the details are here — but why’s it so much more expensive than the Xbox version?
Kinect for Windows will be available on 1 February 2012 across 12 countries, including the US, Canada, the UK and western Europe. When it goes on sale, the suggested retail price will be around £165, according to Microsoft’s announcement.
What do you get for that? Physically, not much more than you get for Xbox: the hardware, Windows software, and ongoing software updates for both speech and human tracking. They’re also introducing a special educational pricing — no doubt just as much for academics as for school kids — which will make it around £100.
So, are there any revelations in the tech? One is striking: near mode. If you’ve used a Kinect at close-range before, you’ll know that they, well, just don’t work very well. To optimise the device for use with a PC, Microsoft have had to pour a lot of time and effort into getting that working at a distance of around 50cm, so it’ll be interesting to see how well it works. It will also support gesture and voice commands for many embedded Windows systems, which could prove useful. I’m not going to go into how the changes affect developers, but if you’re interested, you should read their blog post.
But, the big question is: why’s it so much more expensive than Kinect for Xbox? According to Microsoft:
“The ability to sell Kinect for Xbox 360 at its current price point is in large part subsidised by consumers buying a number of Kinect games, subscribing to Xbox LIVE, and making other transactions associated with the Xbox 360 ecosystem.”
Fair enough. Somehow, I suspect this Windows version won’t sell as well as the Xbox version, but we’ll have to wait and see. [MSDN Blog]
Image credit: bfishadow/flickr
Xbox 720 May Require Kinect to be Plugged in, Switched on and Watching You
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The Windows 8 Public Beta Rumoured for a February Release
Wonder if this will show up on the MS academic alliance.
I sold my Kinect a month after getting fooled into buying one.
It was laggy, inaccurate and the games were all the same basically. Glad I sold it when I did, as now my local game/gamestation/CEX are full of them, I’m guessing all the other owners soon felt the same as I did, that it was a well sold and short lived gimmick.
Its a little pricy but its success will depend on how reliable it is and if they can make it useful. Gestures and head tracking would be fantastic in a PC and existing systems that do it are very impressive but still very niche options so getting it mainstream would be fantastic. I don’t think its going to sell that well in people with windows 7 machines but if MS can integrate it into windows 8 at all levels then I can see it taking off.
Hopefully their “near mode” will somehow port back over to the Xbox too. My Kinect is pretty much unusable for gaming in my flat unless I move the sofa.
Would one of these: http://www.dealextreme.com/p/designer-s-super-zoom-for-xbox-360-kinect-sensor-range-reduction-adapter-112794 do you any good?
I don’t have a Kinect so no idea if these things work or not.
Does “near mode” mean the hardware is actually physically different in some way or another? If not, what’s stopping me from connecting my Kinect to my PC?