Hmmmm, this would be interesting to see with TWO Kinect’s, that’d fill all the blanks, right?

Thats aweswome…………

Its a nice start towards the right direction. I might buy one soon if cool stuff like this comes out. Would not buy it to play stupid kinecct games.

This is incredible. The Kinect is going to open up a lot of avenues of research.

I really want to see someone do something with 4 of these, you could do so much…

ok, how long until someone builds a esper machine out of all this?!

Next stop 3D PORN!

Anywho …

Would interfacing the kinect with a wii be HaD worthy?

I may have a crack at it later this week if so …

Wow, I did not realize the system was that precise. I thought in situations as this that the depth stepping increments would be closer to a foot or so in distance if not more.

Judging from the coffee mug and torso shots however, it seems the distance granularity is much smaller! Now I want one

Hopefully, someone will write a “Parser” environment for Kinect data. To make files that could somehow be rendered into Skeinforge Etc parameter/object details.

Enlisting the commercial solid print bureaus like oh-Shapeways and their peers in a scheme of “printed object credits for prize funding” might kickstart the ideas.

It would be way cool to have 3D busts of my Grandkids..

I’m wondering… what would it look like if you added a mirror in the kinect’s vield of vision?

Now someone just needs to hook this up to a cheap 3D display for live holographic video calls.
My bets are on something like the DLP project+spinning mirror combo. Or possibly a spinning LCD if someone can get all the power & signal connections to it.

Quick Thought: You can use different IR wavelengths. You would have to replace the IR LEDs. And code how to detect them.

>Sorry guys but you likely can’t do more than one at the same time, it projects a IR pattern as part of gathering data, that would interfere and fail with more than one in a room.

kind of reminds me of that software from movie Deja Vu

Not sure if the kinect requires any reference points for calibration – but instead of different wavelengths (which I imagine would be difficult/impractical) couldn’t you setup a shutter system, solid state. Block the IR of other units, sample data on one and cycle. Would slow down your available refresh rate.

Sweet hack mate, very impressed.

@TheZ

I don’t know about different wavelengths for multiple kinects. Alot of it depends if the kinect can differentiate between different wavelenghts AND being able to hack the firmware to do stuff appropriately. Hasn’t all the hacking been on the computer side of just controlling it and getting useful information back? I’d either go with very narrow filters or synchronize all the kinect together and some multiplexing. If it is possible, I’m sure someone will figure out.

Wasn’t it in Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the galaxy that they mention the progression of user interfaces as: physical button -> touch interface -> wave hand and hope it works? Isn’t the third stage upon now? I’m wondering how long I have to wait before I can control my Mythtv box with hand gestures in the air.

you could put on a gimp suit where each joint is a different colour (forearms, hands, thighs etc). The computer could use the colour coding to identify each joint, do measurements etc…then it could do motion capture….add the motion capture to a real time or post calculated 3d scene with digital actors….hurray. How long till we get kinect to bvh converters?

Keep up the good work everyone! Kinect is coming along nicely :)

I swear I’ve imagined doing this for years, and how cool the glitches and shadows in some set ups would look.

In regards to those arguing against using multiple Kinects at once, one could consider putting something along the lines of the ‘shutter glasses’ (used for many of the current ’3D’ displays) over the IR projectors, and dropping the (depth) frames not associated with the ‘currently projecting’ Kinect. I’m sure that a bit of crafty software design could interpolate the two 15Hz (normally 30Hz IIRC) streams fairly well, too.
Better yet if the exposure time is less than 1/60th of a second (30Hz/2) and the sync can be intentionally offset…

da13ro beat me to it… I really have to refresh the page sometimes before posting things. Still, this thing is full of awesome capabilities, and it’s great to see that so many skilled people are making use of it.

polarization would work just fine provided that there was enough light remaining after the fact for the camera to work properly.

So would strobing them on and off alternately — it’s a very common procedure when you have multiple sensors operating on the same band (ultrasonic distance sensors are a notable case, since there’s not much ability to reject returns).

Filtering for wavelength might work, provided that you had physical bandpass filters on the camera. The depth sensor is monochrome and would react basically the same to any frequency it’s responsive to (different brightness but because it’s an uncontrolled environment you can’t rely on that to differentiate two sources).

I would guess that polarization would be the cheapest and quickest to implement, with bandpass filters being not that much more complex. Time-division multiplexing would only be a good idea where you absolutely cannot modify the kinect hardware in any way for some reason…otherwise it’s just a waste of effort.

I do really want to see what happens if you put a mirror in the path, though. I’m imagining a “window” in the feed through which you can look and see the other side of your room, just as if the mirror were actually a window into an alternate dimension :P

Its unlikely that they modulate the IR output (as in pulse the laser/LED whichever it is) because the camera would have to be able to capture at least that fast. >120Hz for US incandescent lights. So, a camera that captures video at greater than say 300-400 FPS to adequately figure out whats noise and whats signal. Doubt they used anything like that. I think the polarization would be the best bet without opening up the connect. Would try it if I had another connect and time…. Maybe someone can try using two pairs of the free 3D theater glasses. One glasses lens for each projector and depth camera.

I just looked at this guys youtube page, OMG, this guy is on it! I thought I was fast with code (only uControllers) this guy rocks! He did some augmented vr, addressed the mirror question, etc..

As a follow up to my comment I just saw another video of his, with a cg model of a creature sitting on his desk moving and all in real time. He’s really not that far from the Zbrush idea.

Imagine a Kinect above your monitor as your sculpting with your hands the model on the monitor?

@EquinoXe

Polarization is normally not sustained under diffuse reflection, so even though the light would be polarized, the light coming back from the scene wouldn’t. I guess a shutter system as suggested above could do the trick, but then you’d have to hope that the kinect doesn’t use any type of temporal coherence.

wait a second , take kinect’s depth sensor and fit it on cars , viola – instant crash proof car from the future

@Mr Hacker

That image turned out to be a bit of a lie/simplification. It actually does use infrared dots, and it does not use ‘time of flight’, as that image suggests. To get an idea what the dots look like, have a look at http://www.dailyvsvidz.com/2010/11/kinect-infrared-projection-dots-vs.html

Woah… Looks like I’m gonna get one… as soon as the rush clears and prices become reasonable…

Could one simple supercheap option for more complete 3d scanning be using a mirror? You would probably need some matrix algebra magic to do the necessary transformations for the 3d scene seen trough the mirror but it could be possible if you can take the hit from decreased accuracy. Also the refelcted dots from the mirror may interfere the foreside scanning.

Oh and the dots remain the same size as I recall? A non-laser source would have them be larger farther back would it not? And out of focus.

@fdsfdsf This is about hacking it, this is hackaday, this isn’t about microsoft’s plans, although if they made a multi-kinect setup people could hack that too I guess.

If you want to talk about the kinect as used on the xbox, here’s a fun link:
http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/15/microsoft-exec-caught-in-privacy-snafu-says-kinect-might-tailor/

impressive!!!!

Well, the more kinects the better. You’d probably want at least four (in a pyramid shape) but 6 would be easier to set up (like walls of a cube) and would give better picture output.

I want a kinect now :)

I would love to see how accurate this is. A 3d scanner with code to interface into solidworks and make solid models would be AMAZING. Maybe one camera waved around at different angles and compared to previous versions of the same item.

Faro arms are expensive :P

What if you simply placed two kinects on either side of the room facing directly at each other? The pattern from one would be in the shadow of the pattern from the other. A dot from one might land directly on the other’s sensor, but if the pattern stays consistant you’d only need to adjust the positions slightly. You’d have a black vertical band around everything, but it would still be twice as good as with one.

This might be a great brain wave or could be floored please criticise and share your view of this concept I suggest… Anyway the device projects a “grid” of IR dots over its field of view and uses them for the measurement. There for we are thinking that having more than one will cause the individual intersecting grids to confuse the sensors right? Could we be able to sync both grids into one uniform grid? From this uniform grid each different camera could take their individual perception of the grid and then be pieced together into rendering the 3d environment.

This + 3d printer + work = printable action figures of yourself

Has anyone noted that Mr Kreylos has a web page of interesting projects?

Anyway, I noted that he got two Kinect units working together. Scroll to the bottom of the linked page to see more: http://idav.ucdavis.edu/~okreylos/ResDev/Kinect/index.html

- Robot