Hacked Kinect is now a 3D video capture tool

Here it is on the creator's website instead of a lame blog post: <a href="http://idav.ucdavis.edu/~okreylos/ResDev/Kinect/" rel="nofollow">http://idav.ucdavis.edu/~okreylos/ResDev/Kinect/</a>

I'm not in this space or planning on investing time into this but I just wanted to say Kudos to Microsoft for creating something that developers are excited about again... even if they didn't indent to do that. I'd start hacking on this if I wasn't invested in a different direction.

If money is no object, commodity stereo equipment exists with better range than the Kinect. From Wikipedia:<p><pre><code> The Kinect sensor has a practical ranging limit of 1.2–3.5 metres (3.9–11 ft) distance when used with the Xbox software. </code></pre> The Kinect was limited by cost, size, and the need to work in poor lighting conditions. But by spacing your higher-quality cameras out (increasing the baseline), accurate depth at 10 meters is a reasonable goal.<p>One such device: <a href="http://www.ptgrey.com/products/bumblebee2/index.asp" rel="nofollow">http://www.ptgrey.com/products/bumblebee2/index.asp</a><p>Accuracy chart: <a href="http://www.ptgrey.com/support/kb/data/stereoaccuracy.xls" rel="nofollow">http://www.ptgrey.com/support/kb/data/stereoaccuracy.xls</a> [XLS warning]

I hope he links up two or three of these to form fuller 3d models of a room.

Don't miss:<p>a) His other video of the system where he shows that measurements of 3d objects exactly match real counterparts: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1ieKe_ts0k" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1ieKe_ts0k</a><p>b) His homepage of other experiments: <a href="http://idav.ucdavis.edu/~okreylos/index.html" rel="nofollow">http://idav.ucdavis.edu/~okreylos/index.html</a>

Wow, this reminds me of the holographic home movies in minority report. We have the camera, now all we need is the projector.

For the frequency of the news about Kinect hacking I get the feeling that the homebrew software for Kinect will soon boost with much more professional features than the official software, esp. since it's pushed with games.<p>As Microsoft sells these things highly subsidized to claim profit with on the games I see lot's of conflict potential.

It's rough but still pretty damn cool. Software that does this from footage can easily be in the thousands of dollars. Image the results if you pair a kinect with this: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEOmzjImsVc" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEOmzjImsVc</a>

Idea: Please, someone somehow need to attach via software a Kinnect and a 3D printer.

Take 3 cameras and you get full 3D. Then project on a 3DTV, and you have a much more immersive video conference!

I expect to see a lot of homebrew robots using Kinect for vision in the near future!