Kinect is a motion sensing input device that was available for military purposes. Now they have decided to make it available for larger masses. Well, the question arises like What is Kinect?
- Face recognition
- Depth imaging
- Gait analysis
- Skeletonization
Actually, the main use of Kinect is to trace out the terrorist hanging around with the general public. We can use it for gestural interfaces using biometrics’ motion capture.
Fine, coming to the fact, photo and video processing is being done in computer for a long time. But it’s very much limited and we miss much of resplendent capabilities, which we observe in the human vision system like recognizing body language, differentiating objects in space, able to predict the next destination of a linearly moving vehicle. All these kind of stuff can be done in Kinect.
How Kinect can be used in Robotics?
You can use Kinect to produce physical objects on a 3d printer in which Kinect acts as a Scanner and creates a humanoid robot, which does whatever you do and many more.
The Kinect uses a camera and IR-projector to produce a depth-image of the picture in front of it. It records each pixel of a distant object. When we look at depth images, they look like strangely distorted black and white pictures.
Well going into the hardware part, it has:
- IR Projector
- RGB Camera
- IR Camera
Do you know? From Irobot to Pixar’s Wall-E peoples use Kinect as the camera for eyes.
Well, I forgot to say some important fact. The Kinect is inevitably a Microsoft Product for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 video game system. It is the output from the tremendous research performed by the Microsoft Research Team for many years. In addition, Kinect was an extra-ordinary commercial success. It was sold to about more than 10 million units within one month of its release, making it the fastest selling computer peripheral in history