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Adinnieken on 23 May 2013
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drkohler said:
Adinnieken said:

a) Kinect used a passive infrared system, where an area is blanketted with IR light, and the temperature/strength of that light is measured to calculate the distance.  It's a technology that's fraught with peril, as it can easily be washed out in bright sunlight. 

b) Kinect 2 uses a passive infrared system, where a laser scans the room and depth and motion is measured based on the time it takes for the light (photons) to return from the surface it's shot at.  This is the same technology used by satellites to map the earth, it's called LIDAR.  Kinect 2 is so much better than Kinect, that it is possible for Kinect 2 to measure your heart rate.  In fact, it is possible for it to detect certain medical conditions as they're happening.

a) No, the spacial shift of the random speckle pattern is transformed into depth information (in the case of Kinect, with approximative formulaes, as the exact formulaes include triangular functions, and the processor in the PrimeSense was removed by MS late in the stage).

b) Kinect2 is a tof-camera. It uses a very short IR pulse (not a laser) and measures the time of flight of the photons (hence tof) that bounce back from whatever they get reflected. The heart thing has nothing to do whatsoever with the tof camera. The only medical condition Kinect2 would be able to detect is the condition when you are lying dead on the floor.

I incorrectly said passive.  It should be active.  Yes, it is a TOF camera.  I believe the IR Pulse is still done by a low power laser as it was in Kinect. 

The heart thing does actually have everything to do with the TOF camera.  The camera is sensitive enough to measure the pulse evident in certain parts of your skin.  In fact it can also detect flushing of the skin.  If you watch the Kinect 2 video, you'll see this mentioned.

If it's capable of detecting flushing or if it is able to monitor your pulse, there are certain medical conditions that it would be able to detect.  A cardiac arrhythmia for instance.

Also in regards to Kinect, one processor was removed.  Microsoft had the option of putting two processors on-board the Kinect but opted not to because 1) at the full resolution of the cameras, the bandwidth available of the USB 2 connection couldn't handle the amount of data that could have been pushed down the pipe, with a reduced resolution there was less data and less need for having the two ICs, and 2) for what amount of data was left with the lower resolution, it could be offloaded onto the console.

The problem wasn't even technically the USB 2 pipe, but rather the USB controller in the original Xbox 360 design.  This was modified with the Slim, hence the dedicated port, but because the original couldn't provide the bandwidth, especially if anything else was plugged into the USB ports, they had to reduced the amount of data they were sending down to the console.