Best Kineckt hack ever! (I must get one of these for my laboratory...)

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Real World Mapping with the Kinect

January 23, 2011 Martin Szarski Leave a comment Go to comments

Many people have experimented with using the Kinect for more than just user interaction. One thing that I have been very interested in is extracting point clouds from the device.

People at the ROS (ros.org) project have gone to some trouble to determine empirical calibration parameters for the depth camera (disparity to real-world depth) here, and Nicolas Burrus has posted parameters for the RGB camera (relationship between the depth image and the RGB image) here.

Putting those together, one can take the depth image from the Kinect and turn it in to a metric point cloud with real distances. Then, those points can be projected back to the RGB camera centre to determine which RGB pixel corresponds to each depth point, and hence arrive a colour for each point in the cloud. This lets the surfaces captured in the image appear textured. With a bit of coding I came up with this:

One of the stranger uses of a hacked Kinect that I've seen: Building models in Minecraft.

(If you don't know what Minecraft is; it's a Java based MMOG that's very low-rez and also highly addictive for some people.)

This is a rather technical video, but the concept is quite cool.