Kinect
Microsoft released a cheap depth camera that tracked a person's pose in real time with no controllers.
Why it matters
Three-dimensional perception cost a hundred and fifty dollars, and robotics laboratories bought it faster than gamers did.
Pose estimation was built on a randomised decision forest trained on hundreds of thousands of synthetic depth images of the body, running on the console's own graphics processor. The side effect outgrew the intent: Kinect became the standard cheap depth sensor in robotics and vision research, because laser scanners had cost far more. It is also one of the first mass-market products with machine learning running on the device itself.