Microsoft 's Kinect is now in the Guinness World Records. The global authority on record breaking awarded that honor to the company's successful gestures-in-air controller for being the fastest-selling electronics device ever, selling an average of 133,333 units daily since its launch. To top things off, Microsoft announced Wednesday that the Kinect has sold 10 million units worldwide through the end of last month.
The Kinect's phenomenal sales record, including eight million units sold in the first 60 days since its release on November 4, outstrips "both the iPhone and the iPad for the equivalent periods after launch," according to Guinness.
Five Million Projected
When it was released, Microsoft had projected selling five million units through the end of last year. Kinect's sales are a major factor in the 55 percent increase in revenue in the company's Entertainment and Devices division for the last quarter of last year, and in the projected 50 percent rise expected for the current quarter.
By contrast, Sony's new motion-sensing controller for its PlayStation, Move, has sold about three million units through the end of 2010, since its launch in September.
Despite all of the promotional hand-waving that Microsoft did to launch its hands-free game controller, Kinect, the company may have underestimated its appeal. In addition to sales to game players, the Kinect has instigated a cottage industry of radical experimentation by developers that could have a major impact on user interaction with a wide range of non-game devices. With the Kinect, users control the device through in-the-air gestures and motion, as well as voice commands.
One university researcher, for instance, has used the two cameras in the device to gain control of the 3D software and turn the unit into a 3D camera. In Kinect, one of the cameras shoots video, while the other measures depths, resulting in a 640 x 480 video stream and 320 x 240 depth stream.
TVs, Windows
Others have gotten the Kinect to work with Mac OS X, Windows 7, and Linux computers. Israeli company PrimeSense, which makes the chip controlling motion-sensing in the peripheral, has said that it is licensing its chip for other uses, such as controlling PC functionality in TVs.
After the first experiments, Microsoft had issued a statement that it "does not condone the modification of its products," and that "numerous hardware and software safeguards" are intended to reduce the chances of "product tampering." It later noted that, in fact, Kinect software and hardware were not in fact modified, but only the software in the main device that interacted with the Kinect, and it has since embraced the research.
Michael Gartenberg, Research Director at analyst at the Gartner Group, said "ten million units is impressive and shows that the Kinect is not just a peripheral for the Xbox but is leading to an evolution of the Xbox platform itself."
He added that ten million units "will resonate very, very well" with developers, as will the company's recent release of a software development kit and its current efforts to integrate the technology into an upcoming version of Windows.Source
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