A Look Deep Inside Xbox 360 Kinect

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From gizmodo.com.au:

Raghu Murthi, the general manager for Natural User Interface Hardware, is holding a Kinect, stripped naked, as a dozen people gawk at its innards. The exposed metal seems cold. He's telling us about the optical system - how it sees with the three holes in its head that seem like eyes. Without the plastic housing they look like they're bulging out. We're at the beginning of day-long tour of Kinect, gathered in the Great Room, the living room you wish you had, but tucked behind a sliding wall inside one of the many food courts on Microsoft's sprawling campus. 3D sensing has been around for 15 years, Raghu explains. What Microsoft has done, he says, is taken 3D depth-mapping technology that typically costs $US10,000 to $US150,000 and made it at volume, for cheap.

http://pictures.xbox-scene.com/xbox360/Kinect/kinectdeepdive_10_01-400.jpg

The way the optical system works, on a hardware level, is fairly basic. A class 1 laser is projected into the room. The sensor is able to detects what's going on based on what's reflected back at it. Together, the projector and sensor create a depth map. The regular old video camera is held at a specific distance away from the 3D part of the optical system in a precise alignment, so that Kinect can blend together the depth map and RGB picture for dynamic, on-the-fly greenscreening.

 

Full Story: gizmodo.com.au

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