Kinect Could Eventually Come To Smartphones, says MS

In an interview with Slashgear during Build 2014, where Kinect v2 for Windows was demonstrated, Microsoft’s Michael Mott explained the true endgame of Kinect: getting to smartphones.

We’ve been pioneering this Natural User Interface, and it’s been delivered to you and to customers mostly through Xbox and through a device. But we know and we’ve seen what happened with devices that they get smaller, they get cheaper, they get embedded, and then they get spread across. The camera’s a perfect example: you used to get a bad camera, now you get a 41-megapixel camera in your Nokia.

So I could see the hardware itself and some of the power that the microphone array and the cameras and sensors coming down in cost. The other piece is the software, and the software just gets smarter about understanding what kind of quality of data you’ve got. And even if it’s imperfect, if can now algorithmically understand that, okay, well if you’re moving your arm this far, and I miss something along the way, you’re probably going to move your arm the rest of the way.

When Terry Myerson talked about Kinect being the future, I think that was his shorthand for saying the natural user interface that we’re building - through a combination of hardware that will come down in cost and move across devices, and software that will get smarter and be more ubiquitous across platforms - that’s where I think you’ll see these things move into phones, and tablets, and so forth.

A lot of the technology we use for voice recognition and translating that into action is the same underlying technology that’s behind Cortana. So I think you’ll see us do that; I think you’ll see the same thing that we do, everything we’re learning on the TV with Kinect, is then translating into the natural user interface capabilities that we can put on the phone. For example, on Xbox, you sign in based on facial recognition. Your phone should just unlock when you look at it. Wouldn’t that be nice? It seems obvious.

With the advances recently seen in smartphones technology, this doesn’t seem that far fetched. Would you like to see Kinect on your smartphone? Let us know below.