Microsoft is moving Kinect to the cloud, company CEO Satya Nadella announced today during the company's annual release of the compilation. "Kinect, when we launched it for the first time in 2010, was the first to speak, the first to look, the first to see the vision, it was used in games, and later came to the PC and was used in many applications: medical, industrial, robotics, education, "said Nadella. "We've been inspired by what the developers have done, and since Kinect we've made tremendous progress with respect to some of the core technologies in HoloLens, so we're taking those advances and packaging them as Project Kinect for Azure."
great news after the depth camera and the microphone accessory that originally debuted on the Xbox 360 were declared as dead last October, when Microsoft stopped making them.
Alex Kipman, Microsoft technician, explained in a LinkedIn blog post that Project Kinect for Azure would combine the depth sensor with Azure AI services that could help developers create devices that will be more accurate "with less consumption of Energy". Kipman also notes that deep AI learning in depth images could lead to "cheaper AI algorithms to implement" that require smaller networks to operate.