The original Microsoft Kinect v1 will no longer be available come 2015, as the company has announced plans to phase it out.

Roughly four years after launching its controversial Kinect depth-sensing gadget, Microsoft has announced that it plans to stop selling the original Kinect in 2015. The company has already launched its new Kinect v2 and SDK 2.0 a couple of months back, and the demise of the original Kinect v1 doesn't come as such a big surprise.

"In October, we shipped the public release of the Kinect for Windows v2 sensor and its software development kit (SDK 2.0). The availability of the v2 sensor and SDK 2.0 means that we will be phasing out the sale of the original Kinect for Windows sensor in 2015," Microsoft announced in a company blog post on Tuesday, Dec. 30.

As a reminder, the original Kinect v1 for Windows (see image above) heralded a new era of depth-sensing cameras, but has also stirred plenty of controversy since its launch. Nevertheless, the DIY hacking community became fond of the gadget, as did various companies that used it for facial recognition, motion tracking, and a number of other purposes.

With the new Kinect v2 now available, however, Microsoft will continue selling the original Kinect v1 only while supplies last, meaning that it will not replenish stock once current units sell out. With that in mind, interested customers might want to stock up on the original Kinect v1 while they still can.

"The move to v2 marks the next stage in our journey toward more natural human computing. The new sensor provides a host of new and improved features, including enhanced body tracking, greater depth fidelity, full 1080p high-definition video, new active infrared capabilities, and an expanded field of view," the company further explains. "Likewise, SDK 2.0 offers scores of updates and enhancements, not the least of which is the ability to create and publish Kinect-enabled apps in the Windows Store. At the same time that we publicly released the v2 sensor and its SDK, we also announced the availability of the Kinect adapter for Windows, which lets developers create Kinect for Windows applications using a Kinect for Xbox One sensor. The response of the developer community to Kinect v2 has been tremendous: Every day we are seeing amazing apps built on the capabilities of the new sensor and SDK, and since we released a public beta of SDK 2.0 in July, the community has been telling us that porting their original solutions over to v2 is smoother and faster than expected."