The lights are on
Microsoft is casting a net trying to find entrepreneurs, engineers, and other people with big ideas who want to use Kinect to help their business.
Kinect Accelerator is a grant program that will award 10 finalists next year with an Xbox 360 development kit, a Windows Kinect SDK, office space at Microsoft, and the chance to show their wares at a Microsoft-sponsored dog and pony show.
Microsoft is looking for applications in the medical, art, business, and yes – games – fields.
This reminds me of the time that Limp Bizkit held open auditions for a new guitarist with the dubious intent of ripping off any riffs played during the auditions. But hey, Kinect certainly needs all the ideas it can get, right?
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the kinect just needs to be discontinued
Well it's great to see Kinect being used elsewhere other than the family-friendly games it gets played on. Not saying that's a bad thing, but Kinect has a lot of potential, and it's not being used that much.
This is great news. The Kinect is an astonishing piece of kit. I work for a company making military training simulations, and we've used OpenNI for mo-cap, but the stability isn't good enough yet for commercial applications. This could be a game changer.
For those still knocking the Kinect, give it time. As David Braben pointed out recently, the humble analogue stick took three years before the first games to make good use of it appeared.
desperate much?