Kinect 2 for everybody!

Up until recently, Microsoft has officially said that the Kinect that came bundled with the Xbox One would not be compatible with Windows. This all changed yesterday, when Microsoft announced that they would be shipping a $50 adapter that allows you to use your Xbox One Kinect just as you would a Kinect for Windows v2. Performance is identical between the two devices. Good news for Cinema Mo Cap-ers!

This has some interesting implications. This is going to make it far easier for users of Cinema Mo Cap to get their hands on a compatible Kinect v2. The Kinect for Xbox One is far more readily available than Kinect for Windows v2 will ever be (and is a lot more likely to be scored at second hand stores!) So this will definitely make it easy for Cinema Mo Cap users to take advantage of the improvements we’ve made to our motion capture solution for Unity.

The Kinect v2 is going to vastly improve the over quality of Cinema Mo Cap captures. Although better than just a web cam, the original Kinect was limited in many ways. We were restricted by it’s low resolution output of both the depth camera, and the colour camera. This Kinect v2 gives us access to much more data, although it remains to be seen how much of it we are going to utilize in Cinema Mo Cap. The first Kinect gave us 20 joints, this new sensor gives us 26. This includes joint rotation (will make your motions much more life like!) even some information about what your hands are doing! Although we can’t track individual fingers, the Kinect v2 gives us multiple points in the hands, including thumbs. The only slight downside to having all of this extra data, and that 1080p video stream on top of that is that Kinect v2 requires you to use USB 3.

Stay tuned for more news about the new release of Cinema Mo Cap in the coming weeks!