will sell 5 million units between now and Christmas. We’ll have more details and a review of the system soon, but for now it’s worth taking some time to think about how it all works.

Camera

Kinect’s camera is powered by both hardware and software. And it does two things: generate a three-dimensional (moving) image of the objects in its field of view, and recognize (moving) human beings among those objects.

Older software programs used differences in color and texture to distinguish objects from their backgrounds. PrimeSense, the company whose tech powers Kinect, and recent Microsoft acquisition Canesta use a different model. The camera transmits invisible near-infrared light and measures its “time of flight” after it reflects off the objects.

Time-of-flight works like sonar: If you know how long the light takes to return, you know how far away an object is. Cast a big field, with lots of pings going back and forth at the speed of light, and you can know how far away a lot of objects are.

Using an infrared generator also partially solves the problem of ambient light. Since the sensor isn’t designed to register visible light, it doesn’t get quite as many false positives.

PrimeSense and Kinect go one step further and encode information in the near-IR light. As that information is returned, some of it is deformed — which in turn can help generate a finer image of those objects’ 3-D texture, not just their depth.

With this tech, Kinect can distinguish objects’ depth within 1 centimeter and their height and width within 3 mm.

Story continues …

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Authors: Tim Carmody

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