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It looks like years on from making the Kinect a mandatory piece of kit for its Xbox One console, Microsoft is ready to admit that it's a failure. The recently debuted Xbox One S, doesn't come with a port for the Kinect. If you want to use a Kinect with it, you'll need to snag a special USB adaptor for it.
This news was actually broken a couple of days ago by Microsoft itself, but the press is only catching up with it now. In the blog post detailing the Xbox One S, a paragraph near the end detailed some of the physical changes Microsoft made to the console and one of them was dropping the Kinect port.
“In order to make the Xbox One S as compact as possible and make all of these updates, we removed the dedicated Kinect port from the back. Kinect for Xbox One will still be compatible with Xbox One S via the Xbox Kinect Adapter for USB connection and offers the same great experiences as the current console.”
This is no doubt demoralising for fans who spent extra to make sure they had a Kinect with their system and for developers who built games around the IR camera technology. Still, one upside is that Microsoft will give out the adaptor free to those who want it.
If you buy an Xbox One S, all you have to do is head to the relevant support page and you'll be directed to a page to help you get hold of an adaptor, which Microsoft will send to you without charge we're told.
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KitGuru Says: It's a shame that the Kinect didn't work out, but I have never played a game for it that was fun or intuitive because of the Kinect. What about the rest of you? Did you ever like the little Microsoft spy cam?
Seems a bit odd to remove it now they are going to be heading into VR with Scorpio. The kinect is a fantastic input device for roomscale VR input. I hope the Scorpio keeps it so that the amazing technology in the Kinect can be put to use.
I agree I think the issue was that the kinect was a bit before its time and just didn’t quite work with flat panel displays as it kinda just ended up being considered Microsoft’s take on the wii. Resulting in it having very few games released for it and fewer of them really having any true playability.
The body motion tracking and object recognition abilities that the kinect has is far more advanced in terms of what is included with some of the VR headsets that have just come on to the market recently.
I have a Vive and its great, been looking at all the work being poured by people to make the leap motion an integral part of that with hand tracking, the kinect is a full body leap motion and I hope people start to pay attention to that and use it to its potential.
From what I read that didn’t “remove” it, they just changed the way you connect it to save space (giving them the ability to reduce the size of the case). If you plug it in with the USB adapter, all the function is there. Sure, it is a little more inconvenient but I they didn’t take anything away. Plug it in = works, so what exactly did they remove? Microsoft probably should have just made the Kinect attach via USB from the start and then this would have been a non-issue.