Microsoft Kinect - A Look at the Implications of this Amazing Device.

I've been following the recent developments in the news about the new Microsoft Xbox Kinect, and this camera strikes me as an absolutely amazing piece of hardware. The Kinect Wikipedia article is a good place to read up on what it is.

The fun part is that the Kinect has been hacked, and with its hardware free to breathe, the implications of what can be done with the Kinect are wonderful, since it is such a powerful 3D camera for relatively very little cost (retails now for $150.00).

The first hack was shown in this YouTube video: Adafruit First to Hack Kinect

This UC Davis researcher shows his hack here.

A Windows-based Kinect hack is talked about here.

This site is dedicated to open-sourcing the Kinect: www.openkinect.org

The neat thing about the Kinect is that it has a pair of infrared stereo video cameras that produce a depth-map in real time. The depth map looks similar to what Philips was using with their WOWvx A3D video standard.

If the Kinect can be hacked on a PC and you can get a real-time feed of both the Kinect's video (2D video from one camera) and also the real-time depth map which aligns with the 2D camera feed, then the possibilities are endless with amazing new 3D applications you can expirement with at very low cost. Big thanks to Microsoft for such a nice piece of equipment.

Ben Hale
Orlando Digital Media | B3N Media | Production Companies

Since the Kinect is brand new and it seems like new cool uses are coming out every day, I'll just list the newer info in links below:
(1) Interactive Puppet Prototype

Exporting Models from Max into Autostereoscopic Animations

To get models created in 3ds Max to export into a format that can be imported into an autostereoscopic 3d (A3d) compositing program, I use an A3D camera plug-in, which you can download from 3D International Europe GmbH, formerly Visumotion.

This special camera is actually 9 cameras side-by-side (you could actually make one if you have max ninja skills). [3D Artist, #19 has an artical on how to create a lenticular 3D camera setup in 3ds max] Each camera sees the frame from a slightly different horizontal perspective - but all focused on the same point.

You can then export the scene by saving it a a TGA image sequence. What you are doing is saving 9 separate images per one frame of video. So, for a video with 30 fames per second (fps), multiplied by 9 full-scale images per frame, you have 270 frames per one second of autostereoscopic video.

When you want to combine the nine separate TGA image-sequences back into a playable format, the next step is to compress all the video streams using H.264 and wrap them in an MP4.

Another Player-like software package will read all nine perspective frames per frame and rasterize them together according to the rule of the lenticular overlay. The image it creates, when seen through the special lenticular overlay, appears as 3d to human viewers.

I think this technology is amazing. Sure, there are still some issues with the technology (one being that you need to be viewing the monitor in certain spots, and if you move your head left or right while watching the 3d monitor, the image will go out of focus. I explain the 3d viewing planes in another post).

How to Create a 3D Camera

Good reading from popular Mechanics:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/how-to/tips/how-to-make-a-3d-camera