The Kinect Creation Story

The history of Kinect begins long before the device itself was conceived. Kinect has roots in decades of thinking and dreaming about user interfaces based upon gesture and voice. The hit 2002 movie The Minority Report added fuel to the fire with its futuristic depiction of a spatial user interface. Rivalry between competing gaming consoles brought the Kinect technology into our living rooms. It was the hacker ethic of unlocking anything intended to be sealed, however, that eventually opened up the Kinect to developers.

Pre-History

Bill Buxton has been talking over the past few years about something he calls the Long Nose of Innovation. A play on Chris Anderson's notion of the Long Tail, the Long Nose describes the decades of incubation time required to produce a “revolutionary” new technology apparently out of nowhere. The classic example is the invention and refinement of a device central to the GUI revolution: the mouse.