Kinect Inventor Leaves Microsoft After Allegedly Watching Lewd VR At Work

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Kinect Inventor Leaves Microsoft After Allegedly Watching Lewd VR At Work

Remember the Xbox Kinect, the piece of tech so advanced it achieved the miracle of squandering the Xbox 360's chances against the mess that was the PS3? Yeah, we'd think that Microsoft would've fired the guy that came up with it on the spot, but Alex Kipman has enjoyed a very privileged stay at Microsoft up until now. He's just resigned not due to the guilt of having paved the way for the bizarre Star Wars Kinect games, but after the surfacing of numerous accusations of harassment – and of watching VR porn while at work.

The very awful Star Wars Kinect's dance mode

Disney

(Still more in character than making Vader live in a castle built atop a lake of molten sand.)

Yeah, on top of pushing tech that never looked promising in the first place, Kipman also created an uncomfortable environment for the women who worked for him. One ex-Microsoft executive saw Kipman rubbing one woman's shoulders even after she'd tried to stop him, and it gets even weirder. He was also caught watching VR Porn at work –oh, did we say caught? That's wrong, actually. He made his team watch actual VR Porn for what were probably totally legitimate research and development reasons. Kotaku says that over 25 employees came together to report him to Satya Nadella, Microsoft's big boss, in what we assume was an attempt to send him to the dimension Kinect Milo has been trapped in for his entire life.

Milo was a Kinect mascot of sorts, a supposed tech demo that obviously ended up going nowhere.

Microsoft

Milo: Can I please get the hell out of here? It's been over 10 years
Microsoft Lady: Sorry, the best I can do is get you an awful cellmate.

The Kinect wasn't the only massive failure on Kipman's hands, as he followed up on that flop with the HoloLens, the mixed-reality smart glasses that need no introduction because every single one of us uses them every day. We just find it so interesting that Kipman's career at Microsoft managed to survive all of his crappy tech endeavors to die at the hands of VR, a kind of tech that actually shows a lot of legitimate promise for gaming.

Top Image: Microsoft

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