Inside Kinect

Microsoft has renamed project Natal, its new game interface, as Kinect - and don't you think that most of Microsoft's code names are better than the final moniker that they adopt for the finished , or nearly finished, thing.
While there is a lot of over-hyped and staged excitement about the new human interface it is interesting to know that the same technology is already generally available.
It seems that Natal/Kinect is the next step down the gestural interface road but notice that this step is mainly soft rather than hard. The new Kinect XBOX 360 add on is mainly an innovation in software.

It is a box with some cameras that makes use of IR illumination to obtain depth data, color images and sound. The IR is used as a distance ranging device much in the same way a camera autofocus works. It is claimed that the system can measure distance with a 1cm accuracy at 2m and has a resolution of 3mm at 2m. The depth image is also 640x480 i.e. standard VGA resolution. The color image is 1600x1200.
A custom chip processes the data to provide a depth field that is correlated with the color image. That is the software can match each pixel with its approximate depth. The preprocessed data is fed to the machine via a USB interface in the form of a depth field map and a color image.

Read more: I Programmer

Posted via email from .NET Info