| foodfather said: I honestly don't understand what makes Kinect so expensive. The technology has been done before, almost 6 years ago in fact. |
Well, I made first contact with a tof camera sometimes in the early eighties when our research group had quite some money left for an apparatus and we visioned either a excimer/dye laser combo, or a tof camera (as far as I can remember, roughly 10 by 10 pixels). Both cost about $60'000 at the time. (We went for the laser, fortunately). Fast forward into the new millenium and you could already get tof cameras (160*120 pixels) for under $10'000. Fast forward another few years into around 2010 and you could get a 320*240 tof cameras for around $8000. Now if you look around you can probably get a 320*240 tof camera for around $500 (in larger quantities).
Now MS is including a 500*400 pixel behemoth of a tof camera with their console. Upto maybe two years ago, such a device would still be way, way over $1000. Mass manufacturing the device, ms somehow succeeded in reducing the manufacturing costs by apparently over 95%. Assuming $30 for the tof chip (which is really neat and small), there also is an expensive (compared to the original Kinect) rgbi full hd camera (with much better lense), and a rather large soc that does all the data assembling and processing (easily a $25 chip). Then you have the whole case (which is not cheap metal sheets cobbled together), a ventilator, programmable ir diode array and some other electronics stuff and you easily get to $150 manufacturing costs. Such a Kinect device would have easily cost you $5000 a few years ago...
