Microsoft's Kinect apparently scored a Guinness World Record on its way to selling 10 million units, representing a bright spot in the company's consumer strategy.
Microsoft may
be struggling against Apple and Google to win the hearts of consumers, but the
company can take pride in at least one achievement: Kinect, its hands-free
controller for the Xbox 360, is now the world's fastest-selling consumer
electronics device.
That record
was confirmed by Guinness World Records, which knows a thing or
two about these matters. Kinect has apparently sold an average of 133,333 units
per day, outpacing other white-hot consumer gadgets such as the iPhone and
iPad.
Microsoft
claimed March 9 that some 10 million Kinect units had sold worldwide in the
four months since its launch.
For Microsoft,
Kinect represents a chance to penetrate the casual-gamer market that made the
Nintendo Wii such an enormous success, as well as increased the lifespan of its
5-year-old Xbox 360 console.
Soon after the
controller's release in late 2010, reports emerged of tech pros modifying the
Kinect's 3D camera-capable of tracking 48 points of movement on a user's body,
and then translating those movements to a digital avatar-for use in non-gaming
projects. Videos started cropping up on YouTube, demonstrating what the
next-generation hardware could do, aside from virtual fencing and dancing:
painting 3D images in mid-air, say, or tethering Kinect's motion controls to an
iRobot.
After an initial
period of public disapproval, Microsoft seemed to have second thoughts about
those Kinect modifications. Alex Kipman, Microsoft's director of incubation for
Xbox, claimed in a Nov. 19 interview with NPR that Kinect had been left open by
design.
Kinect
represents just one facet of Microsoft's increasingly aggressive push into
natural user interfaces. For some time, the company has planned to introduce
touch, gesture and voice-activated technology into a wide range of products,
including video games and vehicle-dashboard systems. Voice is a prime component
of that strategy, although the assets acquired from Canesta, a maker of
3D-image sensor chips and embeddable camera modules, will also play a key
role.
Kinect's
success comes as Microsoft struggles to find its footing in some other consumer
areas, notably mobile. Despite the massive advertising push behind the recently
launched Windows Phone 7, Microsoft's share of the smartphone platform market
dipped 1.7 percentage points between October 2010 and January 2011, from 9.7
percent to 8.0 percent-trailing competitors such as RIM, Google Android and
Apple's iPhone. However, Microsoft executives have also acknowledged that it
could be some time before its newest smartphone platform sees significant consumer
uptake.
Nicholas Kolakowski is a staff editor at eWEEK, covering Microsoft and other companies in the enterprise space, as well as evolving technology such as tablet PCs. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, Playboy, WebMD, AARP the Magazine, AutoWeek, Washington City Paper, Trader Monthly, and Private Air. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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