When the Microsoft kinect was released to the world all enthusiast wanted to know how does microsofts kinect work. The Microsoft Kinect is a basically a device that senses motion and is therefore used as an input device for the Microsoft xbox 360 video game console. it is modeled on the concept of a web cam atop the video game console. The Microsoft kinect aims to promote the use of natural user interface when inputing commands to the xbox video gaming console.

The kinect does the job of turning the real images received by the camera to 3 dimensional computer generated images that recognize the objects. The kinect camera uses a sort of “sonar light system” where light is first transmitted to an object then the time taken for the light to bounce off the object. this is then measured or recognized as depth while considering this times. Use of infrared light reduces the number of false positives that would be otherwise experienced when using visible light. This infrared also ensures centimeter accuracy on depth and millimeter accuracy on width.

this data is then processed by the the software on kinect in order to render the above said digital 3d rendering of the object. The Kinect software uses such complex algorithms so that it can recognize body parts for example hands and their movements. Also impressive is the capability of the software to distinguish between two different faces by using face structure comparison. That why it is able to “know” two different users of the same xbox 360.
A primary feature of the Kinect is the gesture recognition and the fact that it can simultaneously track up to six faces for motion and gesture analysis to be output through a thirty hertz frame rate and a Bayer color filter on an RGB stream.

Another added feature of the kinect is the audio. Bearing a specialized range microphone capsules to be able to receive voice commands with a 16 bit channeling and sampling rate of sixteen kilohertz.