Microsoft Kinect is back, as a $399 IoT device

The Azure Kinect combines depth-sensing cameras with an array of microphones, connecting with Microsoft's cloud. At Microsoft's HoloLens 2 unveiling here in Barcelona at MWC 2019, another product made a quiet debut. The Xbox Kinect, an experimental motion-controlled camera and microphone array for games, died in 2017 and was a precursor to the HoloLens headset. But the Azure Kinect Developer Kit is back alongside the HoloLens 2 as a PC peripheral and developer kit, designed to also connect to the cloud and be used for computer vision-related tasks without a computer. The developer kit can be preordered now for $399 (about £300 or AU$560), a little over a tenth of the cost of the $3,500 HoloLens 2. To Microsoft, they're two parts of the same story.