Depth Sensing

Figure 2-1 will serve as your guidebook to the Kinect hardware. Let's start with the depth sensing system. It consists of two parts: the IR laser emitter and the IR camera. The IR laser emitter creates a known noisy pattern of structured IR light at 830 nm. The output of the emitter is shown in Figure 2-2. Notice the nine brighter dots in the pattern? Those are caused by the imperfect filtering of light to create the pattern. Prime Sense Ltd., the company that worked with Microsoft to develop the Kinect, has a patent (US20100118123) on this process, as filters to create light like this usually end up with one extremely bright dot in the center instead of several moderately bright dots. The change from a single bright dot to several moderately bright dots is definitely a big advancement because it allows for the use of a higher powered laser.