Microsoft's Kinect gets dissected

With Microsoft's Kinect ready to make its appearance for Christmas, T3 has been flown out to the US to take a lengthy look at how the technology works.

Three in-depth features from the gadget maestros take in the sensor, the motor and the way the voice recognition works.

"[The motion sensor] is made of two main parts: a projector and an IR VGA camera. The former bounces out a laser across the entire field of play, which the camera picks up to separate you from your sofa on what's called a 'depth field'," explains T3.

Pixels

"It's essentially all the pixels that Kinect gets back as IR noise measured in varying colour dependant on how close they are to the system," it continues. "That way bodies appear a bright shade of red, green etc, and things further away appear grey.

"The software takes this image and runs it through a host of filters so that Kinect can work out what's a person and what's not.

"The system follows a basic system of guidelines, such as 'a body is from x-foot tall to x-foot tall' and 'a person has two arms and two legs' to work out that your coffee table or dog aren't extra players. It's also taught to be able to pick you out if you're wearing baggy clothes or have hair coming over your shoulders."

It's a fascinating look at the internal workings of one of the big new gaming technologies in 2010 – and you can check out more at www.t3.com/feature/xbox-kinect-how-the-movement-tracking-works.

As you all know by now, T3 is a part of Future Publishing, as are we. But they didn't pay us to put this up, we just liked it.

From T3