There's no doubt that the Kinect 2.0 sensor add-on that will be included with every Xbox One console is a remarkable piece of hardware, even though it likely boosts the overall cost of Microsoft's next-gen machine by $100. Microsoft actually designed the hardware inside Kinect 2.0 from its Silicon Valley-based Architecture and Silicon Management offices.
One of the hardware pieces in Kinect 2.0 is the time-of-flight camera, which sends out light signals and measures how long it takes for the light to return to the camera. It allows the Kinect 2.0 sensor to create an accurate depth map of a room. In a new post on the Microsoft Fire Hose blog, the company talks more about how members of Microsoft Research teamed up with the Xbox team to solve some issues in getting the camera ready for the new Kinect hardware.
The blog talks about the number of challenges the teams had to overcome to get the camera working, such as making sure the camera clearly separated foreground and background objects in a room, along with minimizing motion blur. The two teams managed to overcome those challenges and more in time for the Kinect 2.0 hardware to ship with the Xbox One console on November 22nd.
Microsoft Research has also uploaded two new videos that show off aspects of Kinect 2.0. One shows how the sensor detects a human and how he or she moves in a room, along with monitoring human heartbeats. The other video shows the higher fidelity and larger field of view that the 3D Kinect camera has, along with its 2D color camera and Active IR, which lets Kinect see in the dark and gets rid of any distracting ambient light.
Source: Microsoft
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