Hands On With Microsoft's Holographic Goggles 171
First time accepted submitter mkukuluk writes Forget Google Glass — Jessi Hempel describes the amazing experience she had with the new Holographic goggles from Microsoft. From the article: "The headset is still a prototype being developed under the codename Project Baraboo, or sometimes just “B.” [inventor Alex] Kipman, with shoulder-length hair and severely cropped bangs, is a nervous inventor, shifting from one red Converse All-Star to the other. Nervous, because he’s been working on this pair of holographic goggles for five years. No, even longer. Seven years, if you go back to the idea he first pitched to Microsoft, which became Kinect. When the motion-sensing Xbox accessory was released, just in time for the 2010 holidays, it became the fastest-selling consumer gaming device of all time.
Right from the start, he makes it clear that Baraboo will make Kinect seem minor league."
this is awesome (Score:5, Insightful)
wearable glasses are dead, long live wearable glasses! srsly though, MS approach makes sense. GG never made sense. projecting data onto your visor for real-time augmented reality? that's cool.
Re: (Score:2)
Onto or into? That makes a huge difference here.
Re: (Score:2)
No. It will *never* interact with reality. You are hung up on the motorcycle example, and not looking at the others.
Re:Still doesn't make sense (Score:4, Interesting)
Think of the scene in the matrix where operators are guiding ships in and out of Zion. There is a huge 3D interface for them to interact with.
You could eventually get right of ALL external displays. All of them. No longer would you need a tv in every room, or at all. The TV could be as big or as small as you want, any where you want.
You would no longer have to produce any external interfaces at all. Everything would be virtual, seamlessly integrated into your current environment, anywhere you are.
Imagine playing a shooting game where the enemy is seamlessly integrated into your house.
The possible applications for AR are truly astounding.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Think of many situations where mock-up training is needed (for example, working in radiation fields). If you could practice a task in a safe environment before actually doing it, you could safe hundreds of person-hours of exposure.
These are impressive, and I hope they continue to develop them.
Re: (Score:2)
You can *absolutely* be thrown out of a hotel for using running water, and I guarantee -- outright guarantee -- that some people will use this in hotels and not be kicked out. I'd say being obnoxious about running water is *way more likley* for you to get booted from a restaurant or hotel (and a hefty fine at that) than being an asshole with one of these.
You don't need a tablet, but people buy tablets.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
The first use for technology like this, especially if it can't be taken out of the home, is always porn. Guys are going to wear Hologlass to make their wives look like Beyoncé.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
As with every other rapper, Kim Kardashian.
Amazing (Score:4, Insightful)
The team they have working on this is excellent, the idea is promising, the reviews are great, and the advertising is good. Looks like a solid win. If they have good patents on it, they should be able to control a large and growing market 5-10 years out.
William Gibson and others have prior art. (Score:2, Insightful)
If they have good patents on it, they should be able to control a large and growing market 5-10 years out.
William Gibson and others have prior art. Not sure if you watched "Minority Report", or if you have read Gibson's "Virtual Light", but both describe this sort of thing in immense detail. It's basically a straight forward interposition strategy with slightly smaller hardware than has typically been used in the past.
The real issue that's going to come up is idiots wearing these things while driving, and so on, which is actually not as idiotic as it sounds, but will definitely be illegal as hell for no reaso
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
writing a science fiction book doesn't qualify as prior art.
Re: (Score:3)
https://www.spaceglasses.com/ [spaceglasses.com]
Re:William Gibson and others have prior art. (Score:4, Insightful)
Is there anything more than a flashy website behind that?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
That seems to use a very different technique so it doesn't count as prior art.
Remember, it's not an idea that gets a patent is a particular implementation.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually it does. Raising a ship from the depth of the ocean by slowly filling it with inflatable baloons was non-patentable because this idea was shown in a disney cartoon, so fiction work does qualify as prior art.
Re:William Gibson and others have prior art. (Score:4, Insightful)
As pumped air flotation systems were in use in the 19th century, I'd suggest it wasn't the Disney cartoon which killed the patent...
Re: (Score:3)
you don't patent the glasses as single, monolithic item. you make up about 300 bullshit patents like "method for utilizing parallax to create depth of view in wearable binocular computer displays .. on the internet"
Re: (Score:1)
Sort of the same thing that happened with Google Glass 1.0, when people didn't undertand that it couldn't film 24x7 because they didn't understand the concept of "connectivity" nor the concept of "battery life".
(-1, Irrelevant troll)
Re: (Score:1)
Not that Gibson will see a dime. He might, like Heinlein (Waldo), get it named after the story though.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
That's not how "prior art" works. An idea is not patentable. A precise description of how to achieve an idea is patentable. William Gibson may have written some great stories about VR, but those stories are not descriptions of how to implement VR. I realize that many patents are terrible patents, and should either never have been granted or should be constricted, but I'm talking about the goal of patent law, not arguing about each individual patent.
Minority Report is another story / fantasy, with som
Re: (Score:2)
What reviews?
Re:Amazing (Score:5, Informative)
These bits from Engadget sum the most important elements up for me.
The negative:
"In practice, the resolution is sharp but the field of view is extremely limited. There's a rectangular area in the center of your vision that acts as your "window" into the reality HoloLens presents. It's this limitation that makes HoloLens not a VR headset, and also keeps it from being the Back to the Future 2 glasses we're all waiting for (I'm waiting for that, anyway). "
"The bigger issue for me was that the image was relatively transparent, which often made things look less than real."
The positive:
"Tracking -- which is to say, "how the headset interprets where your head is in relation to the world around you" -- felt the most fully-baked of any of the headset's sensors. Though the prototype was a bit finicky to move very quickly in, I had no issue turning around quickly or kneeling, or any other movements I tried."
( http://www.engadget.com/2015/0... [engadget.com] )
Re: (Score:2)
I see your google query, and I raise you one:
https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]
Q. How does one subtract light? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
How does this device handle a dull or dark holographic image projected in a bright environment?
I don't think it projects anything, the power supply would be... well larger, I would think the hologram is created in the goggles which you would see as an item where it should be expected to be, on the wall, table, in the air.
I did check https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] before this reply, to quote:
A hologram can be copied optically by illuminating it with a laser beam, and locating a second hologram plate so that it is illuminated both by the reconstructed object beam, and the illuminating beam. Stability and coherence requirements are significantly reduced if the two plates are located very close together.[42] An index matching fluid is often used between the plates to minimize spurious interference between the plates. Uniform illumination can be obtained by scanning point-by-point or with a beam shaped into a thin line.
So knowing as much about them as you, the goggles are most likely two plates with an fluid separating them, the holograms being produced on the fly
There also exist holographic materials that do not need the developing process and can record a hologram in a very short time.
While I choose the quotes to show how it could be done within t
Re:Q. How does one subtract light? (Score:4, Interesting)
Q. How does one subtract light?
A. One could have a layer of LCD pixels that block/pass light as required.
Re: (Score:1)
You all learned the answer in high school: if you have a wave, then you can reduce its amplitude or extinguish it by adding a copy if the same signal with the opposite phase.
This has been done to reduce acoustical noise, but it's rather harder to accomplish with light waves. But then, holography is all about interference.
Re: Q. How does one subtract light? (Score:3)
Don't get confused by the marketdroids calling this 'hollographic'. It's nice stereo, but it's stereo. Holograms require no headgear.
Words having distinct meanings is a useful feature of language.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Q. How does one subtract light? (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes that much is obvious, but the "marketing" video clearly presents objects as solid, not transparent.
It doesn't seem obvious to you as you don't seem to understand the concept. you are looking at a screen, if they choose to place an object on that screen in your vision it can appear transparent or completely solid, depends completely on what they wish to do with it, either way it is completely irrelevant whether the environment is bright or dark as the object is on the screen.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Transparent LCD does that. Another question is, with what resolution? LCDs can be of fine resolution, but you'd need the equivalent of the viewfinder of a high quality SLR camera to ensure it's in the proper focal plane. I think such an optical pathway would be, by necessity, heavy and of limited FOV and light intensity. So inventing a full VR and projecting the external view seems more appropriate, and the quality (resolution, color scale, lag etc.) of the environmental view and the augmentation would make
Re: (Score:2)
Hmm you and a couple of anons 'don't get it', Macfox is trying to ask a question that is reasonable and not that hard to parse, yet he gets the 'you don't seem to understand the concept' from you. His point is that if the visor is fairly transparent, then light from the environment (e.g. looking at a white table) will interfere with the augmentation. I.e. you can't simulate the covering of white table with black tablecloth, even though you can (more convincingly) cover a black table with white virtual table
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
I think you're on the mark, but that would mean the projections cannot be solid as the video portrays.
It can be if the transparency of the glasses can also be locally controlled, a bit like the 3D shutterglass technology but at a much higher resolution than left eye/right eye.
Re: (Score:2)
... and neither can reality... it would be as if you wore sunglasses inside
Definitely interested in this... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll be paying attention to this, because I think this could be a game changer.
Re: (Score:3)
Meta AR [spaceglasses.com] Haptic feedback:
ring [singularityhub.com] Or one of the "glove" concepts
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Granted this is just an interesting concept at the moment, however I think Microsoft may have something worthwhile here. The only thing is lacking (or missing rather) is a tactile interface - so that one could "feel" virtual objects.
I'll be paying attention to this, because I think this could be a game changer.
It's probably more than just a concept. They're marketing it like it will be out for holiday season 2015. It looks like they view this as the "killer app" for Windows 10. The closing of the ad shows both the Windows 10 and Microsoft logos in sequence.
I wonder how it'll play with an HP Sprout or a 3-D printer.
Re: (Score:3)
so that one could "feel" virtual objects.
This is Slashdot. Why not come out and say straight away that you want to feel virtual boobies, then the conversation will get all hung up on the term "boobies" and you'll have made your point: it's all about interactive porn.
Re: (Score:1)
he he he
very interesting (Score:4, Interesting)
Certainly looks a lot more interesting and viable than google glass. Once google pushed the wear it anywhere video camera recording what everyone is doing it became socially a dead product. Lets wait and see if MS can productize it without making the idiotic mistakes of google that led to the highly deserved coining of the word glasshole.
Re: (Score:1)
I think that the difference here is that the HoloLens won't be intended for outdoor use. It is way too conspicuous. People hated the relatively tiny Google Glass.
Instead, I think it will focus more on improving home and office life. From the videos I have seen, I can imagine a world where you can have additional virtual computer monitors to display information that you typically won't interact with. Such as logging information during coding. I would have IRC windows displayed on walls inside my house. When
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
yes, without a doubt, though the damage is probably already done as it is hard to recover such a PR mess. Personally the issue for me is purely the camera, we have enough invasions of privacy without inviting new ones into our lives. I don't want to be in a restaurant, shop or even in public with people wearing google glass as I object to being recorded by others where it isn't strictly necessary, especially people that don't seem to have any social etiquette with regards to the rights of others.
AR-Rift: Stereo camera rig and augmented reality (Score:3)
What is Presence in Immersive Augmented Reality? [willsteptoe.com]
"In a previous post I presented the AR-Rift, a low-cost immersive video see-through AR head-mounted display based on the Oculus Rift DK1 and consumer cameras. Technology affording similar experiences will begin to emerge at a consumer level in the coming years."
Genuine excitement... (Score:2)
This is the first time I have been genuinely excited about any Microsoft product since Windows 7.
This is something I would definitely use.
I can imagine overlaying debugging screens above my computer monitors. Moving more work off my precious screen real estate without needing several new monitors. The potential for something like this is limitless. Provided it really works like we have been shown.
Re: (Score:1)
Holograms? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it is still not holography. It has exactly nothing to do with holography.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
It's lightfield, it is holography (sorta) (Score:5, Informative)
It's not using simple stereo screens, they have lightfield projectors:
http://www.wired.com/2015/01/microsoft-nadella/ [wired.com]
They track eye movement and adjust for that as well. I think you need the lightfield stuff so that the eye if forced to adapt focus for different distances, it's a depth cue that Oculus don't have.
It'll be interesting to see what frame rate and latency they achieve. It sounds like they have a lot of hardware in the headset, so it could be quite good. Plus they only need to render the bit right in the centre of the field of view at high quality.
Re: (Score:3)
It won't be quick. Lightfield calculations are expensive even on modern hardware, nevermind cramming all that into a headset. John Carmack's comments on coding for mobiles are relevant here. Even with ASICs - there's only so much you can get away with.
Re: It's lightfield, it is holography (sorta) (Score:1)
Judging from the various articles I've read, the glasses have a CPU for general computation, a GPU for rendering, and a custom built, specialized processor to handle the light field computation and depth aspects.
Which really makes me wonder about battery life, given that the device is wireless.
But, if anything, I would say these things are over supplied with horsepower and are quite capable of rendering in the technical sense.
I don't buy it. (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
All in the realm of possibility. You can get precise head tracking with a combination of optical and depth sensors fused with compass and gyro sensors. I haven't tried this device, but have seen promising results from similar tech.
The video card doesn't have to be very powerful. In fact, since you aren't rendering a background you can devote all of your video card's power to the virtual objects.
Projecting solid images on a transparent display--now THAT'S a trick.
I can't wait to try these.
Re: (Score:1)
inventor ?!?!??!?! (Score:4, Insightful)
> [inventor Alex] Kipman ... idea he first pitched to Microsoft, which became Kinect
so he invented Kinect? hmm nope, that would be Primesense cleverly going around earlier patents on structure light (for example Viewpoint Corps US6549288 filled in 1999) by using random instead of striped dot pattern.
maybe Kipman invented original Natal aka Kinect 2 aka time of flight depth camera? hmmm nope, that would be 2 or 3 whole companies M$ bought (3DV, Canesta) spending over 1 Billion dollars before settling on ready to sell Primesense camera in the end.
What exactly did he invent? He is a manager at M$, not engineer.
Re: (Score:1)
True enough, but it also called him an inventor, which is misleading.
Wow (Score:2)
...Kipman, with shoulder-length hair and severely cropped bangs...
This is the central message here: this is a guy with shoulder-long hair. That is some impressive street-cred right there, but I'm worried that we hear nothing about whether he uses a tie and suit.
Hmm, am I being too sarcastic? It just gets up my nose when tech-news are presented in a cloud of inconsequential nattering. If this is worth hearing about, surely it can stand on its own merits.
Re: (Score:2)
Hmm, am I being too sarcastic?
No, you're being too whiny. Stop whining.
That's cool and all. . . (Score:3)
But how well would it work for people with prescription eye glasses? Nobody in the demo is wearing eye-glasses - 60% of Americans have to wear glasses and only about 13% of Americans wear contacts. So that leaves over a hundred million Americans having to cram this thing over their glasses just to use it or not buy it at all. It seems that this suffers from the same issue that Google Glass had - prescription eye care. 3D movies are ruined for folks with glasses - try stuffing two sets of glasses on your head for a couple of hours - it flat out sucks. The selection of headphones is limited by how comfortable they are with glasses on for an hour or more. So why would this technology be any better?
The article focuses on how cool it is without addressing the actual practicality of having one - how heavy is it? How likely is it to survive five hundred or more impacts with the floor? What happens when the cat sit in it while it is lying on the desk? Besides a couple of gimmicky things, who cares? How is holography on the inside of my helmet better than a computer screen? I keep hearing about how much cooler it is, but not how much better it is than what I have now. Why is it better? A holographic display is not going to be any more enlightening than a regular display. Besides we already see the world in 3D. I really just don't get why this is anything but "cool" like 3D movies were in the 1970's, 1980's, 1990's, 2000's, etc. It's a gimmick.
Re: (Score:2)
But how well would it work for people with prescription eye glasses?...(snip)...3D movies are ruined for folks with glasses - try stuffing two sets of glasses on your head for a couple of hours - it flat out sucks.
3D movies still have never delivered on their promise for anyone. It's just not a comfortable format for film.
Re: (Score:2)
It's the lightfield that's the kicker. Because that makes it NOT a simple 'picture projected onto a surface'. With this technology, your eyes should be able to focus on different parts of the image and actually getting the results your eyes expect.
Thus it should be possible to include a correction for near- or farsightedness. Your other complaints are merely showing your lack of imagination.
It's a windows system... (Score:2)
glad more people are working on eyeglass displays (Score:2)
Don't compare to Google Glass...Think Cardboard! (Score:1)
You want to see 3D with something strapped to your face, Google Cardboard is the tool to compare this to, not Google Glass.
If you are comparing prices, well, maybe Glass is what to compare it to.
Cylons! (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, like "Wii"
Re: (Score:1)
It pushed depth cameras into non high-end robotics. The Kinect tech wasn't new, it was cheap. Tons of robots now use Kinects to see.
Re:Kinect (Score:4, Informative)
Not bullshit at all. Kinect's first couple of months on sale were extremely successful. In fact, MS made a very nice slug of money from it; unusually for the console business, there was a hefty chunk of profit margin on each unit sold. And it sold a lot of units very fast, because it was never supply constrained; unlike many new console launches, if you wanted one, you could walk into a shop and buy one (supply shortages have limited early sales of the PS2, Wii and PS4 to a large extent, early sales of other consoles to a lesser extent).
Of course, the Kinect basically went on to traverse (on a slightly smaller scale) the same kind of curve of the Wii. Lots and lots of early sales, but faltering when people started to realise that the only games you could practically play on it were short-lived party-games. So after the first few months on sale, sales fell of a brick and games releases dried up. But MS had a lot of sales and made a lot of money in the window before that.
And in what the hell sense is the Xbox brand a dismal failure? Ok, it's never taken off in Japan (basically because Japanese consumers are highly protectionist), but it's generally been a surprising success. The original Xbox managed just over 24 million sales. That's a long way behind the PS2's 150+ million, but ahead of Nintendo's 22 million, despite Nintendo being an established brand at the time and essentially being able to sell in 3 major markets (US, EU, JP) rather than Microsoft's 2 (US, EU).
The Xbox 360 managed 83 million sales until the point where MS stopped reporting sales (the unit is actually still selling). By comparison, the PS3 managed 80 million and the Wii just over 100 million (though the Wii got most of those early in the cycle - both console and game sales dried up in the second half).
And this time around - despite the "disaster for MS" narrative, the Xbox One isn't doing too badly. Sales data is a little hard to compare at the moment, but it looks like the PS4 managed 20 million in a year on sale, the Xbox One 10 million in the same time and the Wii-U around 8 million over two years. The Xbox One is in second place, but set against previous generations, it has sold fast in its first year (remember that console sales tend to accelerate in their second and third years, as prices come down and more games become available).
So MS has a successful console brand on its hands. What it doesn't have is the kind of "single device living room dominator" that Ballmer hoped the Xbox One would be. The new management seems content to settle for "successful games console", though there's a real question as to whether MS will want to be in that space in the long term.
Re: (Score:1)
The numbers of devices sold are not the only thing that you should look at in how successful a device is.
If Gamespot [gamespot.com] is to be believed, they lost about $126 per device. That will only be offset if those people sign up for gold membership or pay for something else on the side.
The win for Microsoft in these cases, is probably about getting into the living room in the first place. In this case, it doesn't lose influence in vital areas of the everyday users life.
Re: (Score:3)
What you say is technically correct for a very narrow span of time, but also one of the most pernicious myths about the finances of the gaming industry.
The article you link is from when the 360 first went on sale in 2005. The 360 remained MS's "main" console until late 2013. Production costs fall wildly over that time. Indeed, in the traditional MS/Sony model of selling consoles, you sell at a loss for about the first 12-18 months, then as unit cost reductions and economies of scale start to work in your fa
Re: (Score:2)
Nintendo managed to get into the causal gaming niche by selling cheap consoles with poorer hardware specs but making up for it with their own games specifically written for that hardware. If you want third party games a lot of them will be ports or cross-platform games and having worse hardware means your port will likely look like shit. The SNES was a bit of a fluke because the hardware specs were better than most of the competition at the time.
Today people have smartphones and soon a lot will have smart T
Re: (Score:3)
That was certainly true for the Wii and Wii-U, but I'm not sure it holds up for Nintendo's other consoles. The Gamecube hardware was, by all accounts, good. Better than the PS2's and not far short of the Xbox's. It's still slightly amazing that the PS2 did as well as it did, given it was both underpowered and a complete dog to develop for.
The N64 was more complicated; most of its hardware was pretty decent, but the decision to stick with cartridges rather than move to a CD format for games doomed it in the
Re: (Score:2)
And in what the hell sense is the Xbox brand a dismal failure?
Has Microsoft's entertainment division turned a lifetime profit yet?
Re: (Score:1)
Has Google's Android division turned a lifetime profit yet?
Has Google's Apps division turned a lifetime profit yet?
Has Google's Anything but search and advertising business turned a lifetime profit yet?
Has Apple TV's division turned a lifetime profit yet?
Has Samsung's Galaxy Gear division turned a lifetime profit yet?
These are all equally interesting questions that I never see raised here. Only as it pertains to Microsoft.
Re: (Score:2)
These are all equally interesting questions that I never see raised here. Only as it pertains to Microsoft.
That raises the question, are those equally interesting questions? The answer: Nope. zzzzz
Re: (Score:2)
I think you're exaggerating. Sony loses money while they are ramping up a new console. They also lost money with the Playstation 3 until they did two hardware shrinks. But they did not have consecutive losses for the past 5-6 years on their gaming division.
Re: (Score:2)
And in what the hell sense is the Xbox brand a dismal failure? Ok, it's never taken off in Japan (basically because Japanese consumers are highly protectionist), but it's generally been a surprising success.
Japanese consumers expect their games to be in JAPANESE. That's the problem. A lot of Japanese know perfectly broken English. FWIW it did reasonably well in Japan for a non-Japanese device.
Re: (Score:2)
In the early days of the 360, MS spent a lot of time and money love-bombing Japanese developers to get them to make games primarily for the Japanese market (though many of them got exported to the West). Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey - the two best Japanese RPGs of the first few years of the last generation - were funded by MS, developed in Japan with Japanese as the primary language and English translations provided later. So language was no issue for those. Similarly, MS pumped a lot of money into Cave, ma
Re: (Score:3)
And in what the hell sense is the Xbox brand a dismal failure?
These are all published numbers. Google them yourself.
XBox development costs: 24 billion
RROD writedown: 1.1 billion
Xbox division losses as at 2007: 5 billion
OK, so by 2007 the Xbox brand was worth negative 30 billion dollars. Earnings since then:
2008: +426 million (first profit for Xbox in a calendar year! yay!)
2009: +169 million
2010 +165 million
2011: +210 million
2012: -229 million (ruh-roh, Raggy)
So for Xbox 360's prime earning years, it made 74
Re:Microsoft's 14 Year Xbox Fiasco (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow, bitter much...
Kinda guessing you're not a fan of the Xbox. Possibly even that you're a bit of a fan of one of its rivals? Remember that blind brand loyalty (or blind hatred of a brand) is self-defeating on the part of the consumer.
Microsoft does not love you and does not have your best interests at heart.
Sony does not love you and does not have your best interests at heart.
Nintendo does not love you and does not have your best interests at heart.
Valve does not love you and does not have your best interests at heart.
The fanboy-arguments between the various sides in the console war are more bitter this time around than I've ever seen them before. Which is ironic, really, given that the actual practical differences between the PS4 and Xbox One are vanishingly small and only really apparent to hardcore enthusiasts.
Re: (Score:2)
The fastest selling gaming device of all time is most definitely not the xbox and why is M$ lying because of course the fastest selling gaming device of all time is not theirs. Just because it also does other things does not mean it is no longer a gaming device. So the smart phone is number one, just because the Losephone (a lot funnier than calling it a Winphone) is one of the worst sellers. The biggest reason why the smart phone wins, is their are a lot more choices than there are for game consoles. Of c
Re: (Score:2)
Going off this [bbc.co.uk] it seems to have managed 8 million sales in 2 months. That's certainly got to be a contender for "fastest selling over 2 months". The PS2, Wii and PS4 all might have been able to manage faster, as might some of Apple's portable devices, if they hadn't been constrained by supply shortages.
Of course, Kinect sale
Re: (Score:2)
That whooshing sound you hear is the irony rushing right over your head...
Re: (Score:3)
"Fastest-selling consumer gaming device of all time"? Bullshit.
Kinect, like everything else to do with Xbox, is a dismal failure. People bought it only when they had to, developers didn't support it, and the product was flaky. Now no-one cares.
I agree, PS2 owned the market, the Cube the first to go and Xbox expected to call it quits soon as they just weren't selling. Then Halo came out and everything changed.
I've never owned a Xbox but have played Halo (~2001) (Quake2 but with better graphics). I had a PC Voodoo 3Dfx graphics card (~1997), it came with a version of Quake 2 made for that graphics card, it's hard to say now which had the better graphics, the 3Dfx or Halo.
Re: (Score:2)
Hate to break it to you but Halo was an XBox release title.
Yes, and it's release made the Xbox relevant for the first time. I wouldn't be far off saying it saved the Xbox. Dependent upon how much money MS was willing to lose before dropping it; it's place in history listed along with the Dreamcast, and the Cube.
Re: (Score:2)
"Fastest-selling consumer gaming device of all time"? Bullshit.
Fastest-selling does not mean best-selling.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Fastest selling != most sold.
Your points, while correct, aren't particularly relevant. 1000 Kinects sold in a month is 'faster selling' than a 10,000 XBoxes sold in a year.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm sitting here in london with a DK1 and a DK2 on the desk next to me, and no policemen have showed up yet..
Re: (Score:2)
You're thinking of The Jerk
Re: (Score:2)
it was the jerk and the opti-grab