How the Microsoft Kinect should have been marketed

Microsoft spent, as far as I know, over a hundred million dollars in merely advertising the Kinect when they were developing it, and succeeded in creating a massive amount of hype around it. It was being pushed and showcased constantly at E3 and other events, celebrities endorsed it, big famous game development companies and publishers endorsed it, and such a huge hype formed around it that its publication became an outright massive party event at many stores in America, with huge countdown clocks (very reminiscent of New Year countdown clocks) and massive crowds cheering and celebrating outside.

Unlike many people might think, the Kinect (both versions) actually sold surprisingly many units: Microsoft reports having sold about 30 million units of the original Kinect (for the Xbox 360) alone. This is actually more than some famous consoles sold during their lifetimes (such as the original Xbox, and the Nintendo GameCube.) In fact, at the time of its publication it broke the Guinness World Record for the fastest-selling consumer electronic device (by selling 8 million units in its first 60 days.)

(This doesn't mean that Microsoft got a huge profit from it, though. It is my understanding that they were selling the device at a loss, like is so common with these things, hoping that they would recuperate the losses with game sales.) 

However, regardless of the enormous sales numbers, the device turned out to be quite a flop in the end.

Its main problem is that it greatly overpromised but underdelivered. It promised to completely revolutionize gaming and to be this absolutely marvelous form of control, with eventually a massive library of games that are extremely immersive and fun to play.

Yet, the device was significantly less accurate than shown and promised in the pre-release demos (which promised, for example, that it could track the movement of individual fingers, which it absolutely could not), it was annoying to use, it only made most controls clunkier and needlessly difficult, and the vast majority of games were significantly simpler and more boring than normal games.

While about a hundred Kinect-only games were ever published, both game developers and the users quickly lost interest. It just didn't live up to any of the hype and promises, and it was a slog to use and to develop for. People quickly moved back to the regular controller (even though according to the Kinect marketing that controller is a "barrier" and limits how you can play games. Oh, the irony.)

Microsoft tried really, really hard to keep the device alive by bundling an updated better version of it with the Xbox One. It didn't help. An abysmal 21 games were ever developed for it, and that's it. While Microsoft tried to keep it alive for a few years, finally they relented and first made it optional and then just dropped support completely. It was declared a complete failure.

One of the major problems (besides the technical limitations such as low tracking resolution) that I see in the marketing is that Microsoft approached it completely wrong: They based their marketing 100% on the idea of the Kinect replacing the regular game controller. In other words, Kinect games would be controlled with the Kinect and nothing else, that's it. Microsoft not only envisioned the Kinect to be better than the regular controller (an idea that turned out to be massively naive), but also that it would be the exclusive control system for its games.

Indeed, from what I have seen 100% of their marketing was based on that complete replacement notion. As it turns out, that didn't pan out at all.

I believe that Microsoft should have approached the Kinect marketing and development in a different way: Rather than being a complete replacement of the normal controller, it could work to enhance its functionality. In other words, while there could still be games that used the Kinect only (such as dancing games), the main use case would be to use the Kinect in addition to and at the same time as the normal controller. In other words, the Kinect would add head and hand gestures to the repertoire of controls.

The most obvious such enhancement, something that would truly add to the gaming experience, would be head tracking: For example in a flight simulator you control the plane with the controller as normal, but you can look around by turning your head. This kind of head tracking systems are available for PC. The Kinect could have brought it to the console.

Imagine such a demo in one of those E3 conferences or wherever: The person on stage is controlling an airplane or spaceship while seated using a controller, and then turns his head a bit to different sides to have the in-game view likewise turn (just like head-trackers work on PC).

Also hand gestures could be added to the repertoire of controls. For example the player could reach with his hand and turn a lever, or press some buttons, while still controlling the vehicle with the controller. Imagine that kind of demo: The demonstrator is driving a car with the controller, looking around by turning his head, and then he moves his right hand to the side, makes a motion forward, and in the game the gear lever shifts forward to select the next gear.

Now that would have been immersive. I would imagine that the spectators would have been excited about the prospect.

(I'm not saying that the Kinect would have become a success if it had been developed and marketed like this, but I think that it would have at least had better chances.) 

Microsoft's White Elephant: The Kinect

Those who never owned an Xbox 360, or those who did, but were never really interested in, nor followed all the hype that Microsoft created around the Kinect, might find it a bit surprising, given how little impact the Kinect had on video gaming, but this device was absolutely massively advertised and pushed by Microsoft back in the day, with borderline outrageous promises and hype. And we are talking about massive promotional campaigns.

The original slogan for the Kinect was "You Are The Controller". The initial narrative, prior to the Kinect's launch (and a bit after that), was that the traditional controller was a "barrier", a very limited form of control that severely limited possibilities. According to the marketing campaigns, "Kinect will change living room entertainment forever".

Microsoft's promotional demonstrations at E3 2009, and several subsequent ones, promised absolutely incredible real-time interactivity. (Given that the actual published Kinect turned out to be enormously less accurate and powerful than advertised leads me to believe that those E3 demonstrations were fully scripted, running pre-recorded animations, rather than being real-time live captures of the movements of the performer on stage.)

Among the things that were promised (with live demonstrations, allegedly in real-time, although as said, I have my doubts) were:

- Accurate full-motion capture of the entire body, with the in-game character following the position and movement of every limb and head very accurately. In one demo this allowed full control of a character wielding a lightsaber, to fight against hordes of enemies, with accurate movements and all kinds of maneuvers (such as force pushes, etc.)

- Moreover, the detection would be so accurate as to allow very precise maneuvering, allowing very small, precise and subtle movements, such as hand gestures, to accurately control something. This included things like opening and closing one's hand, or even moving individual fingers, and manipulating in-game objects with great precision (to even the millimeter range).

- Using the traditional controller would become essentially obsolete, as everything would be usable with the Kinect alone, using gestures and voice. In fact, it was promised that many things would actually become easier with the Kinect than with the controller, especially thanks to the smart voice recognition system. (For example, not only could you make the Xbox 360 play music by saying "xbox, play some music", but you could moreover specify a particular song, an artist, or a music genre, for instance, and the system would quickly find songs matching the specified parameters.)

- Video chat with remote players would be possible, easy, and practical. (In fact, the Kinect could even follow the user's position so as to keep him or her always centered on the view.)

- The Kinect would have full facial and shape recognition, distinguishing between different users, and being able to track the position of each user, and even being able to scan objects of a certain shape, such as a scateboard or a piece of paper, in real time. In one demo, for instance, a player draws a picture on a paper, shows it to the Kinect and "hands it over" to the in-game character, and this character reaches and grabs the paper, which now has the same picture in-game (which the Kinect, at least allegedly, scanned in real-time from the paper using its camera.) The Kinect is able to see that the paper is coming closer, and thus the game character can react to it in real-time, reaching his hand and "grabbing" the paper.

Microsoft got some really big name people to promote the Kinect at some of their E3 presentations, such as Steven Spielberg himself. Several big-name game companies also announced full Kinect support in many of their future games and game franchises, promising significant improvements in gameplay and immersion.

The first launch of the Kinect was made quite a massive spectacle in itself, with tons of money poured into it. Microsoft really, really pushed the Kinect to be a complete revolution of video gaming. A completely new form of control, of playing games, that would make the old systems obsolete, antiquated and limited. (Does this sound familiar? *ahem* VR *ahem*)

Of course reality turned out to be quite a letdown, and the massive hyping campaign to be completely out of proportions. The camera image resolution as well as the framerate of the final retail version of the Kinect was but a fraction of what was promised (something that Microsoft directly admitted a bit prior to publication, citing cost and technical problems both on the Kinect side and the Xbox 360 side), affecting most of the promised features. Motion detection was much poorer than promised, facial recognition was almost non-existent and extremely flawed, as well as the promised ability to scan objects (such as pictures drawn on paper) being likewise pretty much non-existent. Accurately scanning the entire body of a user and replicating it on screen was likewise unrealistic.

I do not know if the Kinect would have worked as promised if it had the technical specifications originally planned for it (both in terms of camera resolution and capture framerate), but at the nerfed specs it was finally published it made the system almost unusable. Rather than replacing the regular controller, and being at least as fluent as, if not even more fluent than it, it was a nightmare to use. Just navigating the home screen, or the main menu of any game, using gestures, was often a pain. Very inaccurate and inconvenient. Most games were unable to accurately detect but the broadest of gestures (even though the E3 demos had promised the Kinect to be able to detect even minor gestures, such as opening and closing one's hand, or even the position of individual fingers), and this made even the simple act of navigating a menu very inaccurate and inconvenient. (In fact, many games opted to skip even trying to detect hand gestures, and implemented the simpler method of just broadly detecting where the user's hand is, and if the user keeps their hand on top of a button for long enough, the game would then activate that button. Needless to say, this isn't the most convenient and efficient or fastest way, nor the most accurate way, of navigating a menu.)

Needless to say, this was quite a big disappointment, both for users and for game developers. Neither of which got the wondrous new form of control that was promised.

Even so, Microsoft still tried to push the Kinect as the next big thing, and induced many game companies to make games for it. Some developers did indeed make Kinect games, even Kinect-only games, especially during its first few years. However, regardless of how much Microsoft pushed the platform, the total number of Kinect games is quite low. Wikipedia lists the Xbox 360 having (at least) 1233 games in total (although the real number is probably a bit higher, as Wikipedia doesn't necessarily list the most obscure games ever released for the console), and from those, only 108 are Kinect-only (with an additional 49 games having optional Kinect support).

108 games is not exactly an abysmally low number of games, but it's still pretty low, considering the success of the Xbox 360 console itself. (Also consider that a good portion of those Kinect-only games are dancing games, which isn't exactly a very popular genre.) The number of games for the Kinect is relatively low, considering how much Microsoft promoted the system.

One would think that after the disappointment that the Kinect was, as it didn't deliver almost any of its promises, and neither the users nor game developers were exactly thrilled about it, Microsoft would have, after a couple of years, just abandoned it and let it die a natural death. But no. For some reason Microsoft was obsessed with the Kinect, for many years to come. So much so that when they designed their next-generation console, the Xbox One (which was published almost exactly 3 years after the original Kinect), they made a new "improved" version of the Kinect for it. They wanted to push it so hard into the market that they actually made it a mandatory peripheral for the Xbox One. Not only would every single console come with the new Kinect bundled with it, but moreover the console wouldn't be usable at all without the Kinect! The Kinect was a mandatory peripheral to just use the console. No Kinect, and the console would refuse to even work!

Due to the massive backlash caused by this announcement, Microsoft reversed that decision just prior to launch, and allowed the console to be used without the Kinect. However, the Kinect would still be bundled with every Xbox One. You couldn't buy one without the other. (It wasn't but almost a year later that Microsoft finally started selling Xbox One's without the Kinect. At about $100 cheaper thanks to that.)

I understand what Microsoft was trying to do: The problem with the Xbox 360 Kinect was that only a fraction of users had it, and thus it wasn't very enticing for game developers to make games for it. However, now that every single user of the Xbox One had a Kinect for sure, that would certainly give incentives to game developers to support it. (After all, that's one of the core ideas of game consoles: Every console owner has the exact same hardware, and this makes the life of game developers much easier. If every console owner has a Kinect, there shouldn't be any problem in adding Kinect support to a game.)

It didn't help. Users still weren't interested in the Kinect, and in fact, the Kinect making the system about $100 more expensive hurt sales of the system quite badly. Perhaps in a vacuum it would have been ok, but the Xbox One had one ginormous adversary at the exact same time: The PS4. Which was selling like hotcakes, while the Xbox One, with its $100 higher price tag, was suffering.

When Microsoft finally started selling the console without the Kinect, its sales figures started improving significantly. (They never reached those of the PS4, but were still significantly better, making the console actually viable.)

Three years after the launch of the Xbox One, Microsoft finally accepted the reality that the Kinect was a completely dead piece of hardware that nobody was interested in. The users weren't interested in it, and game developers weren't interested in it. (There's perhaps no better indication of this than the fact that even though the Xbox One has been on the market for four years, there exist only an abysmal 21 Kinect games for it.)

A nail in the coffin of the poor device was when Microsoft published the Xbox One S, which was a streamlined and slightly more efficient version, and it had no Kinect port at all. (A Kinect can still be connected to it, but it requires a separate USB adapter. The Kinect itself isn't an USB device, instead using its own custom port.)

And, of course, the absolutely final nail in the coffin is the fact that the new Xbox One X has no Kinect support at all. Microsoft has finally effectively declared the system dead for good.

Microsoft really pushed the Kinect to be the next big thing, and probably spent countless millions of dollars in its development and marketing, and did this well beyond what was reasonable. They should have accepted it as a failure in its first couple of years, and not even try to drag it into the Xbox One. The Kinect, however, became some kind of "self-imposed" White Elephant for Microsoft. (In common terminology a "white elephant" is an overly costly possession that cannot be disposed of. In this case, Microsoft imposed this status onto themselves, for at least six years, rather than just getting rid of it.)

The strangest urban legend: Soda can tab collecting

During the entire history of humanity there have always been so-called "urban legends". The modern times are no different and, on the contrary, urban legends have only become even more easily widespread thanks to the proliferation of newspapers, magazines, radio and TV, and quite obviously with the internet it skyrocketed: Where centuries ago it could take years for an urban legend to spread by any significant amount, and decades ago it could take years, in the era of the internet it could take mere days.

Some urban legends are completely harmless and innocuous, as they just make people believe a silly thing that nevertheless doesn't affect their lives or how they behave. Then there are the more harmful urban legends that actually do affect how people behave and what they do, sometimes even in dangerous or detrimental ways. There are also urban legends that have spawned entire cults and conspiracy theories.

Then there are the stranger urban legends that have had a huge amount of influence among people who believe it (and usually refuse to believe otherwise, no matter how much counter-evidence is presented to them.)

One of the strangest ones is the urban legend that collecting soda can tabs and sending them somewhere will help fund wheelchairs or medical procedures for elderly people. Not the cans themselves, but just the tabs.

This urban legend has existed for many decades, starting at least in the 1980's, probably even the 1970's. It might be not as widespread today anymore, but it was still going strong in the 1990's.

Incredibly, a very strange "quasi-cult" formed around this urban legend: Not only would people who believed it spend copious amounts of time detaching and collecting these soda can tabs (again, just the tabs, not the cans themselves) and sending them to somewhere where they collect them, but entire voluntary transport supply chains formed in many countries.

Indeed, there were people who volunteered their time to collect these thousands and thousands of aluminum tabs from some town, and transport them somewhere else, to someone else who got supplied by several such people, and who would then themselves further transport them to the next person up the chain. Entire supply networks formed, especially in the 80's and 90's, in many countries, all on a voluntary basis.

Many investigative journalists have tried to find out where exactly these soda can tabs end up, and it's always the same story: It's always a dead end. They interview these people and ask who they are transporting the tabs to, and it's always someone else in the supply chain. The reporters follow this trail, often consisting of even a dozen different people, a dozen different "levels" in the network, and the result is always the same: Eventually they hit a dead end, where they just can't find the next person or entity in the supply chain. And, of course, nobody of the people they interview know where the tabs are going; it's always just the next person in the chain. They don't know, nor really care, where that person then transports them to.

There doesn't appear to be any kind of conspiracy or secret organization behind it. It appears that this kind of extremely large and complex endless supply chain, which always just ends in some kind of dead end where nobody knows where the next link is, has somehow arisen spontaneously, as a kind of emergent behavior: Volunteers have just showed up to become a part of the huge network of supplies, each bringing the tabs to someone else, until the next one in the chain just can't be found and nobody really knows about it.

Any authority or any other such person who knows about this strange supply chain always tells what should be rather obvious: There is no organization or entity that collects these soda can tabs and funds wheelchairs or anything. Such a thing doesn't exist. Nobody has ever got any wheelchair or medical procedure thanks to these tabs. There is no record anywhere of such an entity, or where the tabs ultimately end. For all they know they end buried in some warehouse somewhere ("waiting" to be transported somewhere), or they end up in a landfill, or something.

Or perhaps someone along the line just sells them to a recycling station for a few dollars worth of money, and keeps that money for himself (which, in fact, is the most likely end point of the entire chain.) In fact, many suspect, the last person in the chain who allegedly "gives it to someone else further in the chain" but doesn't really know who, is likely to just bring them to a recycling center and pocketing the money. Obviously those people are very hush-hush about it. Or it may be that next unknown anonymous person in the chain.

It's also pointed out that, rather obviously, the soda can tabs, no matter how many tons of them are collected, are not even nearly valuable enough to fund any wheelchairs or expensive medical procedures. Ironically, the soda cans themselves, from which these tabs are detached, would be more valuable, but even those could perhaps barely fund one wheelchair, if enough metric tons of them were collected. But, as mentioned, there is no organization that does this. Nobody has ever gotten any wheelchair or anything else thanks to these soda tabs.

Yet, the people who keep (or at least kept in the 90's and early 2000's) detaching and transporting these soda can tabs are True Believers. No amount of evidence will convince them otherwise. In fact, when they are presented the evidence that what they are doing is useless and nobody is getting any wheelchairs, they just say that "you don't know what you are talking about, so you should shut up."

This even though they literally have no idea where the tabs are going, what this supposed organization or entity is, or who has ever got a single wheelchair or medical procedure thanks to it. They just firmly believe they exist, even though they don't know who or where.

It's an extremely strange "quasi-cult". 

Why ChatGPT can be so addictive

If a mere 10 years ago you had told me, or pretty much anybody who's even slightly knowledgeable of technology and computers, that in less than 10 years we will get AIs that can have perfect conversations, in perfect fluent English (and even multiple other languages), understanding everything you say and ask and responding accordingly, in the exact same way as any human would do, and even better, writing perfect essays about the subject if you wanted, in any topic whatsoever, no matter if it's a highly technical scientific topic, or psychology, or pop culture, or anything, and that it could even compose very good and reasonable poetry, song lyrics, short stories, and other similar creative output, I would have laughed at you, and most other tech-savvy people would have laughed as well.

Who would have guessed a mere 10 years ago that almost perfectly fluent conversational AI, writing perfect fluent English on any topic you could imagine, both in terms of grammar as well as the substance of the contents, was less than a decade in the future.

But here we are, with exactly that.

And the thing is, these AIs, such as ChatGPT, can be incredibly addictive. But why?

The addictiveness does not come from the AI being helpful, eg. when asking it for some information or how to do something, or where to find something. That just makes it a glorified googling tool, telling you much faster and much more easily the answer to the thing you are looking for.

That's very useful, but it's not what makes it addictive. The addictiveness comes from just having casual conversations with the AI, rather than it having an actual goal or purpose. Bug again, why? 

There are several reasons:

1) You can have a completely fluent casual conversation with the AI like you could with any intelligent conversational friend. Whatever you want to talk about, the AI can respond to it intelligently and on topic.

2) The responses are usually very interesting. Sometimes it will tell you things you already knew, but probably in more detail than a normal person would. Oftentimes it may tell you things you didn't know, and which might be interesting tidbits of information.

3) The AI is like a really smart person who knows about every possible topic and is always happy to talk about it. Be it astrophysics, or mathematics, or computer science, or programming, or physics, or psychology, or sociology, or pop culture, or history, or a classic movie or song, or the culinary arts, or even just some random topic about some random subject, the AI pretty much always knows about the topic and can give you answers and information about it. There's no topic to which it will just answer "I don't really know much about that." (There are some inappropriate topics that AIs have been explicitly programmed to refuse to answer, or the running system might even outright stop them from answering, giving you an error message, but that's understandable.)

4) Moreover, it's able to adjust its level of conversation to your own knowledge and capabilities. It won't start throwing advanced mathematical formulas at you if your question is at the level of casual conversation, but will show you advanced technical stuff if you ask it to and show that you understand the topic.

5) And here's where it starts getting so addictive: The AI is always available, is always happy to talk with you, never gets tired, is never "not in the mood". It doesn't need to sleep, it doesn't need to take breaks, it doesn't get tired (physically or mentally), it never gets the feeling that it doesn't want to talk at that moment. It never tells you "not now."

6) Likewise it never gets exasperated, it never gets tired of you asking stuff, it never considers your questions stupid. It doesn't matter if your questions and commentary is on the PhD level or at the kindergarten level, it's always happy to have a conversation and will always do so in a positive tone, without getting exasperated, without using a patronizing tone.

7) And on a similar vein, the AI never gets offended, never feels insulted, never has its feelings hurt, no matter what you say, and never gets tired of speaking to you. You could continue on the same topic, repeating similar questions again and again, and it will never get tired of answering, always politely. You can use rude and derogatory language, and even insults, and its feelings will not get hurt. It will not start resenting you, nor start considering you an unlikeable person to avoid. You could even have an argument with it, where you stubbornly refuse to accept what it's saying, again and again, for hours on end, and the AI is literally incapable of becoming frustrated, tired or offended by your responses. It will never respond in kind, and will always retain a polite tone and will always be happy to keep answering your questions and objections, no matter what.

8) Most AIs, such as ChatGPT, are also programmed to be a bit of an agreeable "yes man": If you express a personal opinion on a subjective topic, it will tend to support your opinion and tell you what its strengths are. It will very rarely outright start arguing with you and tell you that you are wrong in your opinion (unless it's something that's clearly wrong, eg. very clearly and blatantly unscientific. But even in those cases it might show some understanding of where you are coming from, if you express your opinion reasonably enough.)

9) But, of course, if you explicitly ask it to present you both sides of a position, it will write a mini-essay on that, giving supporting arguments for them.

But it's precisely that aspect of it being a tireless and agreeable "person" who is always willing and knowledgeable to have a conversation about pretty much any topic, that can make it so addictive. Friends are not always available, friends don't necessarily know every topic, friends are not always agreeable, friends can get offended or tired, but ChatGPT is incapable of doing that. It's always there, ready to have a conversation.

That can be incredibly addictive.