ArnoldRimmer on 15 July 2013
I guess the fact that nobody is even trying to answer the actual "Why does it have to be connected"-question can be interpreted as:
Nobody knows or at least has an idea.
So here's my thoughts, considering some of the things we know:
- We know that Kinect-developer Alex Kipman and Xbox-developers Andrew Fuller and Kathryn Stone Perez filed a patent about charging digital content like pay-per-view-movies depending on the number of viewers. The fact that it was Kinect and Xbox developers who filed the patent shows clearly that Microsoft has considering use cases for Kinect that will rather be in Microsoft's interest, not in the customer's. Even if Xbone will not ship with such use cases like this:
IF they want to at least reserve the possibility to introduce some use cases that are not in the customer's interest like the one described in the patent, they HAVE to force the customer to have Kinect attached, AND they'd even have to prohibit the customer from doing things like simply covering Kinect's all-seeing eye or making Kinect face a wall. Interestingly, while Kinect's very expensive depth-sensing technology is completely useless for the vast majority of games, it's perfectly capable of detecting and preventing such tricks - Another use case for Kinect that would be rather in Microsoft's than the customer's interest is using the Xbone for TV audience measurement. Even if they didn't file a patent, Microsoft has definitely at least considered this idea, for it makes perfect sense for a device that is meant to control people's TV receivers. Basically, it would allow Microsoft to become THE TV audience measurement compary, being able to kick companies like Nielsen Media Research out of business in no time:
- To save costs etc., traditional TV audience measurement boxes submit their data via telephone and only once per day. An internet-connected device on the other hand can report changing the TV channel within milliseconds, making it possible to analyze TV viewer behaviour in realtime
- Traditional TV audience measurement boxes are only installed in a few thousand homes. They're still considered to give rather accurate results, but without a doubt the data would be even more accurate if millions of boxes were supplying data
- Traditional TV audience measurement boxes are a little inconvient to use. For example, you always have to specify how many people are currently sitting in front of the TV. Kinect's capability to see and count viewers is the perfect solution to this problem - not only does it remove the inconvenience, it also prevents against human errors or people trying to provide wrong viewer numbers on purpose, for whatever reason
- And the best of it all: Spreading the required hardware doesn't cost Microsoft a single penny - quite the contrary, they'd be earning money even from the hardware!
