3D video capture with Kinect

Oliver Kreylos hacked Kinect and reverse engineered it to produce 3D video – nice!

The Kinect is an accessory for Microsoft’s Xbox game console. It contains an array of microphones, an active-sensing depth camera using structured light, and a color camera. The Kinect is intended to be used as a controller-free game controller, tracking the body or bodies of one or more players in its field of view.

The motivation for this project was to convert the Kinect into a 3D camera by combining the depth and color image streams received from the device, and projecting them back out into 3D space in such a way that real 3D objects inside the cameras’ field of view are recreated virtually, at their proper sizes

By combining the color and the depth image captured by the Microsoft Kinect, one can project the color image back out into space and create a “holographic” representation of the persons or objects that were captured.

… and this is what happens if two Kinects are connected:

First test of merging the 3D video streams from two Kinect cameras into a single 3D reconstruction. The cameras were placed at an angle of about 90 degrees, aimed at the same spot in 3D space.

The two cameras were calibrated internally using the method described in the previous video, and were calibrated externally (with respect to each other) using a flat checkerboard calibration pattern and manual measurements.

Visit Oliver’s YouTube channel to view the latest videos exploring all possibilities.