

Kinect for Windows SDK v1.6 Enables Seeing in the Dark - benlower
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/kinectforwindows/develop/new.aspx

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benlower
I work on the Kinect for Windows team and would love to hear from anyone who
is working on a K4W project or has an idea. My job is to empower developers to
build amazing experiences so please hit me up if you have questions or need
any help. @benlower or kinectninja at microsoft dot com.

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Rabidgremlin
Almost 2 years ago I worked on a project to create a real-time avatar of Air
New Zealand's Airpoints Fairy. Used a Kinect to do live tracking of an actress
who interacted directly with audiences (via video and audio hookups). She co-
hosted an awards show and a big rugby tournament.

The Kinect worked amazingly well but head tracking was a little iffy. So we
strapped a smart-phone to the actress's head and used it's compass/gyroscopes
to provide fine head tracking :)

There is isn't a lot of footage on the web but check out:
<http://theflyingsocialnetwork.com/archives/1545>

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benlower
sounds pretty cool to have a real-time avatar. your description of the smart-
phone strapped to her head reminded me of this classic hands-free device:
[http://ts1.mm.bing.net/th?id=I.4694782262707040&pid=1.7](http://ts1.mm.bing.net/th?id=I.4694782262707040&pid=1.7)

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Rabidgremlin
You laugh but actually the phone was pretty much duct-taped to a base-ball cap
;)

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Qworg
Finally. OpenKinect has had these features for quite a long time. =)

I'm happy that Microsoft is officially supporting these features - and I'm
looking forward to seeing what gets built.

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benlower
Thanks :-) Developer & customer feedback is a big deal for us and we've been
working to add new capabilities that people want. Anything else you can think
of that you'd like to see us do or enable in the SDK?

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jamesmcintyre
Higher resolution image capture for applications dealing with face recognition
would be awesome. Is the team holding off on face recognition until a higher
resolution camera/kinect is in place?

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Qworg
The camera resolution is fixed by the hardware. I think they'd have to wait
until a better Kinect is built.

That said, you COULD go the way of several hacks I've seen - marry a high
resolution external camera to the Kinect rig, do the correspondence, and use
the external camera as your face recognition input.

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nitrogen
The Kinect (at least the version for the Xbox 360) is capable of providing
1280x1024 Bayer-encoded RGB images at a reduced frame rate.

