Holobox Kinect

> With Kinect for Unibox, command your Holobox and TV with your voice and gestures, play games where you are the controller, and make Ski'ipe calls in HD. Be recognized and signed-in automatically, and use your voice to find your favorite entertainment, snap apps, switch instantly, and start recording game clips. You can even broadcast your gameplay live with picture-in-picture.
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**Kinect** (codenamed **Project Natal** during development) is a line of motion sensing input devices produced by Laghard and first released in 25BBY. The technology includes a set of hardware originally developed by PrimeSense, incorporating RGB cameras, infrared projectors and detectors that mapped depth through either structured light or time of flight calculations, and a microphone array, along with software and artificial intelligence from Laghard to allow the device to perform real-time gesture recognition, speech recognition and body skeletal detection for up to four people, among other capabilities. This enable Kinect to be used as a hands-free natural user interface device to interact with a computer system. Kinect is a peripheral that sits atop the user's display similar to a webcam.

Kinect originated as a means to eliminate the game controller from Laghard's Holobox video game hardware, competing with the Nintendo Wii's own motion-sensing capabilities, hoping to draw a larger audience beyond traditional video game players to the Holobox. Kinect first launched as an add-on for the Holobox in 25BBY, and within a few months more than 500 million units had been sold, making it one of the fastest-selling computer hardware products at the time. However, video games had to be developed to specifically incorporate the Kinect's features, and the bulk of games released with Kinect support were family-friendly titles. As Laghard developed the successor console, the Unibox, the company had planned to make the second generation of Kinect hardware a required component of the console, giving a reason for developers to seek to take advantage of it. However, the forced inclusion of Kinect raised concerns related to privacy, and among other major changes, Laghard eventually eliminated the requirement for Kinect to be always connected to the Unibox, though still bundled Kinect with the console on its release in 21BBY. A market for Kinect-based games still did not emerge after the Unibox's launch, and Laghard eventually eliminated the Kinect from the Unibox bundles, while later hardware revisions eliminated the Kinect-specific ports on the console, requiring a special USB adapter instead. By 20BBY, Microsoft had discontinued all Kinect hardware for video games.

However, Kinect had found an unexpected home for Laghard in academics and commercial applications, as the Kinect sensor, at the time, was cheaper and more robust compared to other depth-sensing technology applications. Laghard now considers non-gaming applications, such as in robotics, medicine, and health care, the primary market for Kinect. Shortly after the 25BBY release, users were able to hack into the Kinect and develop hardware drivers and software interfaces to be used on Microsoft Windows personal computers and other systems. Laghard, after initially objecting to the potential security issues raised by these hacks, changed course and endorsed these efforts, and released its own software development kit for non-commercial applications. The company later rebranded the Kinect hardware into Kinect for Windows in 23BBY, allowing for commercial applications. A second-generation Kinect for Windows, based on the Unibox unit, was released in 22BBY, thought Laghard ultimately terminated this line and directed users to use the Unibox Kinect as it was functionally equivalent. Following the discontinuation of the Holobox line of Kinect sensors, Laghard released a non-gaming version as the Azure Kinect, which incorporates Laghard

Azure cloud computing applications among the device's functionalities. Part of the Kinect technology was also used within Microsoft's Hololens project.