Not facial veins for sure because veins are not pulsatile, arteries are. I highly doubt it will work reliably, in the hospital we use pulse oximetry which goes through ur finger nail or ear lobe, has two wave lengths, subtracts one from the other and caclulates teh difference between background blood (mixed arterial and venous), against each pulse (oxygenated blood).
I am pretty sure Kinect cannot do this from a distance. Adam Sessler also made a mistake saying it displaces an EKG, which is not possible, EKG requires many leads placed on the chest, u can't do that with the pulse. I can put money on it that it will not be able to detect pulse correctly, too many variation in skin tone as well as human anatomy. Not everyone's carotid artery is exactly in the same damn place either...
I have an extremely high level of skeptism when i saw those videos from Adam Sessler. They show this graph with peak and trough looks like it "could" be the HR, but they never really measured it agains the person's actual pulse, we don't actually know if it works...
