Combining Two Kinects To Make Better 3D Video

suraj.sun sends this quote from Engadget about improving the Kinect 3D video recordings we discussed recently: "[Oliver Kreylos is] blowing minds and demonstrating that two Kinects can be paired and their output meshed — one basically filling in the gaps of the other. He found that the two do create some interference, the dotted IR pattern of one causing some holes and blotches in the other, but when the two are combined they basically help each other out and the results are quite impressive."

Comments

Re:Two eyes are better than one

[JanneM]

The "good ol' brain" does a fairly crappy job, actually. 3D vision systems like these tend to perform quite a bit better than we do. And we only do as well as we do because we can use a lot of indirect clues based on our long experience with a 3D-world - we know how big stuff normally is, for instance, so we can judge distance from size. Mess up those clues and we completely lose it.

And even with good clues we don't actually measure distance well. Have somebody place items on a parking lot or some place like that, then try to guess the distances. Not going to be very accurate. Try to estimate distance vertically rather than horizontally and you'll do even worse; you have fewer clues and less experience to fall back on.