Microsoft Kinect Teardown

The Microsoft Kinect has been torn down to reveal what’s inside.

The teardown doesn’t go in to the depth that we see with some of the Apple [AAPL] products, but you do get to see how the Kinect is put together and what is used to capture video.

It’s made of two main parts: a projector and an IR VGA camera. The former bounces out a laser (don’t worry, Microsoft insists it’s safe) across the entire field of play, which the camera picks up to separate you from your sofa on what’s called a ˜depth field.’ It’s essentially all the pixels that Kinect gets back as IR noise measured in varying colour dependant on how close they are to the system. That way bodies appear a bright shade of red, green etc, and things further away appear grey.

When they image is gathered from the sensor the system figures out what is real and what is not and then can interpret the movements made.

From what T3 has reported on, it appears that the Kinect is quite a powerful piece of technology and one that a number of developers will be able to create some interesting uses for.

Via: SlashGear