Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect and how it came to be.

Kinect for Xbox 360: The inside story of Microsoft’s secret ‘Project Natal’ by David Rowan.  Published in Wired in November 2011

Kinect Hackers Are Changing the Future of Robotics by Jason Tanz.  Published in Wired in July 2011.

Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s Chief Research and Strategy Officer, gave a great talk on Technology Convergence at Northwestern University in October 2011.

Why invest your time in these articles?

The Kinect has opened many minds to the near-future of interfaces between us and our computers, and how computers will adapt to our interface needs, instead of the other way around.  The first article explains the product development journey for the Kinect within Microsoft.  The second article explains the story of how Microsoft came to embrace the open source community that sprung up to create new applications using the Kinect.