I've been thinking about this ever since the Xbox One and new Kinect were announced and shown.
The primary purpose of the Kinect seems to be as a sensor for demographic tracking of viewership. When looking at the device and its capabilities, it makes much, much more sense as that, than even as a novel game or home theatre controller.
In fact it seems to me that the Kinect "possibilities" may well have been shoe horned, ret-conned, after the fact, strategically. Which is kind of tinfoil hattish but bear with me a moment longer.
Microsoft saw a possibility to leverage the new Xbox across several different markets: the existing video game/streaming media market that the 360 worked in, plus as a competitor to the likes of Apple TV/Roku/Chromecast, AND as a drop in replacement for all the cable boxen in North America (at least), capable of doing all those functions much better than the VIC 20 guts you find on a typical Big Cable set top box.
Kinect can see how many people are in the room, where they sit, what their expressions are, perhaps their heart rate, what sorta people they are (I.e.kids or adults), and it can do all of this in the dark. Ok. That data is crazy valuable. Highly accurate demo data that is time stamped. No they aren't staring at your boner, they could not care less about your boner; your boner is not valuable data. In fact most of the RGB stuff it captures is sort of incidental, a verification layer.
What they want is: this ad during this part of the Superbowl raised heart rates across the view ship by 22%. There were an average of X many viewers in a given room for Show Y's premiere. 3/4 of that audience was female. 72% of them frowned when the intro played longer than the initial minute of runtime (looking at you, Orange Is The New Black). 46% of the audience left the room when the ad break was placed early in the show. And so on. That data can be compiled into little tiny dB reports, no need to beam fat (and obvious) RGB data back to MS. Kinect and One can compile all of this at the client end.
And then MS has some of the most valuable viewship data in the world, with a high degree of accuracy and integrity.
Every decision MS has made about the Kinect, makes perfect sense to me, in this light. Of course it had to be mostly required. Of course they had to ship it with the console. Of course "Xbox One IS Kinect". It's part of the entire strategy for the thing.
Kinect was proposed first and they reverse-engineered gaming and remote control examples for the tech. It makes so much sense. It's why there's a scant handful of actually compelling use cases for games. It's why they've rolled voice commands in with gestural body tracking and called the whole thing two very different control schemes as "Kinect".
I don't think Kinect was ever meant to be a video game controller, at least certainly not primarily. It's a demographics sensor. The game part was the Trojan horse. The retconned marketing plan made to sell the thing.
Thoughts?
