It definitely does have a higher resolution, an just as importantly it has lower noise because it has switched from structured IR to TOF. It also doesn't seem to suffer from the shadowing issues of the previous version.
the tech is around, but at very high price (a normal pointing laser costs 2k~3k, a proper lidar costs 30k to 70k). I think that is what the parent comment means "very unlikely".
PrimeSense (the company behind the Kinect IR technology) had a competitor at the time called 3DV systems (or something like that), that made an RGBD TOF camera that worked way, way better than the kinect - but they ran into financing problems, and were bought at-cost by Microsoft (something like $30M, which was the investment). That was in 2007, and even back then they were able to produce them for ~$300/BOM if I remember correctly.
At the time, everyone assumed MS just bought them to shut out competitors - but it appears they actually use the thing.
And I was thinking about 3DV Systems' [1] product called ZCam [2]. I wasn't aware of the Canesta deal - apparently, MS cornered the market of depth cameras. Personally, I think this deserves some kind of regulatory anti-trust action. But that's just me.
Thanks! I am looking into this space for a while for my personal project. but 1m~3m distance is too small to my application. Do you know if this is plausible for direct sunlight and anyway to improve the distance?
It's not explicitly measuring the time from emission to reception of individual pulses, that would be (pretty much) impossible with light. Instead, it sends out periodic pulses of light, and measures the phase offset of the lighting of resulting images.
How does using TOF instead of IR prevent shadowing? Unless it can see through you, it's still just going to have a single depth map producing gaps wherever it can't see, right?
A mistake I made in my excitement. TOF and structured light can both produce shadow regions of the depth map if set up like the previous kinect. What it looks like they have done is to switch the places of the RGB camera and the IR projector, which reduces the shadowing effect. Here's a Skitch of what I am talking about: http://i.imgur.com/y6VkRBm.png.
Huge boon for those of us with smaller rooms too - the Wired writeup making the rounds has a 6' tall guy standing 3' from the sensor and having room to spare.
That's my one gripe with the Kinect right now, it just needs too much darn space to work well as a gaming platform.
With all the recent hubbub over printing firearm components, I wonder how quickly legislators will demand the equivalent of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_steganography for tracking specific maker-level printers.
