Ever since Microsoft launched the controller-free Kinect for Xbox 360, the device has taken on a life of its own. First, Kinect became the fastest-selling consumer device in history and then it started showing up outside the living room in healthcare, education,and technology.
With Tedesys’ application, doctors will be able to use gesture or voice controls to examine the same information, hands-free, without leaving the room
“It’s been absolutely inspiring,” says Alex Kipman, general manager of incubation for Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business. “When you have a great vision you expect it to do great things, but it’s humbling and inspiring to actually see it happen and exceed your expectations in terms of the ability – over a very short period of time – that you have affected the entire world.”
That effect – the Kinect Effect – began in its first 60 days on the market, when Microsoft sold a world-record eight million devices. This made Kinect the fastest-selling consumer electronics device in history, according to Guinness World Records. Even as Kinect was enjoying consumer success, everyone from scientists to tinkerers and educators to hobbyists started dreaming up and creating non-gaming applications for Kinect.
“I think it opens up this realm of new experiences that are all about kinetics, not only physically immersive games but all kinds of new experiences,” says Jeremy Gibson, a game design instructor at the University of Southern California.
Since it was launched, Kinect has started popping up in a variety of places like healthcare, education, technology and industry. Kipman says more than 200 businesses, including 25 Fortune 500 companies, have joined a global pilot programme to explore Kinect’s commercial possibilities. Toyota, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Razorfish are among those that signed up.
Keen on encouraging the fast-growing wealth of non-gaming applications that have sprung up for Kinect, Microsoft released an academic and enthusiast software development kit for non-commercial projects and promised to develop a similar kit for commercial uses. Microsoft also launched the Kinect for Windows commercial programme, giving global businesses the tools they need to develop applications on Kinect that could take them in new directions.
The essential vision for creating Kinect was to make complicated technology disappear. That, and building on a platform that has taken millions and millions of years to create – the human body.
“We wanted to create technology that in a way understands us so we don’t have to understand it,” Kipman says. “That state-of-the-art technology combined with simple, fun, intuitive experiences is extremely powerful.”
Kinect removes the barrier of controllers, wands, gadgets or other gizmos or input devices, making the experience simply mano-a-technology. Kinect recognises people. And with a wave of their hand or a voice command, it comes to life, bringing with it games, movies, TV, music, exercise, dancing and sports to their fingertips.
At the University of Southern California, Gibson has Kinect in his classroom. He teaches game design and game prototyping in the School of Cinematic Arts Interactive Division, and says he and his colleagues are teaching students to develop for Xbox and for Kinect to give them hands-on experience with the new technology before they enter the real world.
“It broadens the horizons of our students and gives them the ability to come up with really interesting ideas they can create games out of,” Gibson says. “They’re learning game design, but really that’s just designing experiences for people – it’s not limited to games.”
“It’s fascinating to watch the snowball effect of Kinect,” says Kevin Schofield, general manager of Microsoft Research, which played a key role in developing Kinect. “Kinect has taken something that was really hard to get and really expensive, and made it easy to get and inexpensive.”
Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business – which is where Xbox lives – teamed up with Microsoft Research to develop Kinect, which uses years’ worth of technology from laboratories around the world. It was, and continues to be, an amazing partnership with Xbox, he says.
“It was brilliant people on both sides who came together and made this work,” Schofield says. “These things are always a partnership, and take a diverse set of skills, expertise, knowledge and experience.”
Several inventors outside of Microsoft are using Kinect to develop applications for medical uses. One example is Tedesys, a technology start-up in Cantebria, Spain, that is working on an application that will let doctors use the sensor while operating on patients.
Surgeries often last for hours, and surgeons need to look up a patient’s medical information during the operation to do things like review an MRI or to call up details on the procedure they are doing. Normally, doctors have to leave the sterile operating room to use a non-sterile computer, and then scrub back in to continue the surgery. With Tedesys’application, doctors will be able to usegesture or voice controls to examine the same information, hands-free, without leavingthe room.
“Using Microsoft Kinect, they can check information on the patient without touching anything, and in this way they can avoid [the risk] of bacterial infection,” says Jesus Perez, the company’s chief operating officer.
Daniel Calvo, Tedesys’s chief research officer, says building on Kinect’s software development kit has been an amazing experience. “We have studied Kinect and are using it in a radical way,” he says. According to Perez and Calvo, 6,000 people die every year in Spain as a result of bacterial infection from operating rooms.
Kipman says the healthcare applications of Kinect, “are near and dear to my heart,” whether it’s using Kinect in the operating room or to help stroke victims rehabilitate their motor skills.
Every day Microsoft hears about intriguing new applications of Kinect. Kipman says some of the most touching correspondence comes from families with children with mental or physical disabilities who are able to use the controller-free Kinect.
“We get e-mails telling us Kinect has fundamentally changed the way families interact – that it has profoundly changed lives,” he says. “That moves you.”
At the University of Southern California, Gibson’s Kinect and Xbox 360 classes focus primarily on teaching video game design and storytelling, but he also sees Kinect’s potential outside the living room.
“For Microsoft, I think initially it was this idea to get into the fun, casual gaming market, but I think it’s become more than that,” Gibson says. “There’s this device out there now that’s being developed, and people are doing amazing things with it.”
Schofield says Microsoft putting its products in the hands of developers is nothing new. In his 23 years at Microsoft, he has come to believe that it is one of the company’s greatest strengths.
“We’ve always been a company that’s been about trying to get new kinds of hardware and software out there and letting people play with them and take them in directions you’d never imagine,” Schofield says.
“Kinect follows in a long, consistent history of Microsoft trying to put things out there.”