Microsoft contractors working on Xbox have gained access to audio recordings of Xbox owners’ home life, a Vice Motherboard report revealed today. According to the report, accidentally triggered Xbox voice commands would result in audio recordings stored by Microsoft, which contractors could hear.

First dead in our hearts, and now dead at the manufacturing plant, the Kinect is no longer in production. Microsoft's experimental motion detecting camera, which first launched in November 2010, will die off once existing retail stock is sold, Microsoft told the website Fast Co. in an interview.

Womanhood can be a contortion act. Prospering is often a matter of stretching, compressing and jaggedly code-switching like artists' jointed wood mannequins -- the kind girls buy in middle school when a Cosmopolitan quiz augurs the life of a painter. Perfect Woman, a Kinect game released last Wednesday, is about those contortions and uses physical posturing to comment on its societal equivalent.

Video: Folks, the Kinect lives! A new platformer called Fru just came out for the Xbox One's motion sensor. It uses the sensor in a really clever way, as your body affects the layout of the 2D platformer. Take a look.

When Microsoft unbundled Kinect from the Xbox One in 2014, it was the beginning of the end. Unfortunately for the developers of Fru, the game they were building required Kinect. They were more than two years away from shipping. "We were shattered," designer Mattia Traverso told me.

You thought it was over.

It's not over. It may never be over.

Last year, a pair of German artists claimed to have "stolen" scans of a priceless bust of Queen Nefertiti -- housed in Berlin's Neues Museum -- using nothing but a Kinect. Now, experts are lining up to call bullshit.

In a home filled with technological marvels of all shapes and sizes, one piece of oft-derided hardware gets more love from my family and I than any other. Kinect, tell the nice people how much I cherish you.

Microsoft came out with all guns blazing at this year's E3, delivering one of the best press conferences in recent memory. In dizzyingly fast succession, the euphoric audience was hit with one huge announcement after another -- from backwards compatibility for Xbox One to the potentially game-changing HoloLens in action. One thing that wasn't announced was anything to do with Kinect. As in, literally zero mentions in any context.

Kinect never turned out to be the killer app for the Xbox 360 or One, but it has maintained a fair amount of interest in less entertainment-focused areas, including military and scientific applications. Still, Microsoft isn't super-keen to prop up two separate SKUs -- console and PC -- and has decided to nix the desk-bound version in favour of an adaptor.

So Microsoft's Kinect was a video gaming bust. Whatever. It's still got its uses. Like in helping police fine-tune their "use of force options" against suspects.

Even though Microsoft appears to have given up on Kinect as a serious gaming platform, the motion device still has some tricks up its sleeve. Programmer Paul DeCarlo found a way to play Mike Tyson's Punch-Out by waving his fists around, and it seems to work pretty darn well!

Internal developer documentation for the Xbox One appears to have leaked on the Internet -- and after scanning through the files, it appears that there are some interesting things we can learn from it.

We're currently in the third week of our Shape Up Xbox One Challenge and things are starting to heat up. Last night, Chris and Mark took some time out from the Quest Mode to battle each other in the game's grueling push-up challenge. Here is the video.

Ubisoft‘s Shape Up is a new fitness game for Xbox One that promises to take the "work" out of workouts (it says here). It uses the Kinect motion-sensor to accurately track your movements as you jump, squat and flail your way through assorted exercise challenges. Over the next four weeks, Kotaku's Mark Serrels and Lifehacker's Chris Jager will be taking on the game and each other in a bid to get fighting fit for summer. This is going to get painful, isn't it?

But only if you want to use Kinect.

Dubbed the ARES Sandtable, this US Military prototype uses a Kinect, a projector, software and sand to recreate real-world environments like never before.

It's been ages since I've exercised this much control over the music in a rhythm game, and I've never felt so sore after doing it.

Now, here's some Kinect functionality that I wouldn't mind in a video game. I could've used this when I reviewed that awful Steel Battalion game a while back.