Fresh from Microsoft Research is an ingenious way to reduce interference and decrease the error in a Kinect. Bonus: the technique only requires a motor with an offset weight, or just an oversized version of the vibration motor found in a pager.
Being the first of its kind of commodity 3D depth sensors, the tracking on a Kinect really isn’t that good. In every Kinect demo we’ve ever seen, there are always errors in the 3D tracking or missing data in the point cloud. The Shake ‘n’ Sense, as Microsoft Research calls it, does away with these problems simply by vibrating the IR projector and camera with a single motor.
In addition to getting high quality point clouds from a Kinect, this technique also allows for multiple Kinects to be used in the same room. In the video (and title pic for this post), you can see a guy walking around a room filled with beach balls in 3D, captured from an array of four Kinects.
This opens up the doors to a whole lot of builds that were impossible with the current iteration of the Kinect, but we’re thinking this is far too easy and too clever not to be though of before. We’d love to see some independent verification of this technique, so if you’ve got a Kinect project sitting around, strap a motor onto it, make a video and send it in.
Continue reading “Building A Better Kinect With A… Pager Motor?”
