Kinect Hack Builds 3D Maps of the Real World
Lanxon writes "Noted Kinect-tinkerer Martin Szarski has used a car, a laptop, an Android smartphone and the aforementioned Xbox 360 peripheral to make a DIY-equivalent of Google Street View. The Kinect's multi-camera layout can be used to capture some fuzzy, but astonishingly effortless 3D maps of real world locations and objects. As we saw in Oliver Kreylos' early hack, you can take the data from Kinect's depth-sensitive camera to map out a 3D point-cloud, with real distances. Then use the colour camera's image to see which RGB pixel corresponds to each depth point, and eventually arrive at a coloured, textured model."
This is trivially done with ROS and the Kinect stack. I went out and bought a kinect and plugged them into my robot platforms, provided a transform between robot base and kinect sensor, and was done. It's a great application and anyone who owns a kinect should try it out, but at this point it's trivial and hardly worthy of a /. post.