What is "kinect"

The Kinect module is about 23 cm long and has 5 main features:

• RGB (Red, Green, Blue) camera that allows facial recognition perfect of the person who is in front of the console.
• Depth Sensor (Infrared), which allows the accessory Scan the environment around you in three dimensions.
• Built-in microphone, which in addition to picking up the nearest voices, can differentiate the external noises. Thus, noises to the background do not disturb the progress of Kinect. The microphone is also able to detect several different people in a room (only if knows if the precision is perfect, since it is common, for example, brothers with similar voices).
• Own processor and software.
• It detects 26 points of articulation of our body, that is, it has a unprecedented precision.

The first version gets the brand of the world’s best-selling gadget. With more than 10 million devices sold. Because of this diffusion, came out the first "hacks" that had the function to interpret the data for manipulation with different purposes. The second version despite having greater stability, accuracy and more functionality was not as successful with the development community, even with Microsoft striving to provide tools and documentation to develop applications for the device.

Currently, two tools can be used to manipulate the data. The official Microsoft framework, which makes the treatment at a high level:

• Kinect for Windows SDK 2.0

And a middlework maintained by the open source community, which does the treatment at a low level:

• libfreenect