Microsoft shows off more of Kinect Fusion for Windows

In November, during BUILD 2012 Microsoft first showed off Kinect Fusion, an upcoming new software feature of the Kinect motion-capture technology, in a public demonstration. This week, Microsoft demoed the technology again in public as part of its TechFest 2013 event.

This week's demo was described on Microsoft's official Kinect for Windows blog. As with its BUILD 2012 demonstration, the TechFest demo showed an standard Kinect for Windows hardware add-on was capability of scanning real-world objects or environments with its camera. Those objects can then be replicated as 3D models.

The effort is a collaboration between the Kinect for Windows team and a group at the Microsoft Research offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Kinect for Windows Senior Program Manager Chris White states:

We have worked shoulder-to-shoulder over the last year to bring this technology to our customers. The deep engagement that we have maintained with the original research team has allowed us to incorporate cutting edge research, even beyond what was shown in the original Kinect Fusion paper.

The plan is to add Kinect Fusion in a forthcoming new version of the Kinect for Windows SDK, but at the moment there's no word on when that might happen. It's also not a stretch to speculate that something like Kinect Fusion might be a part of the Kinect 2.0 hardware that's rumored to be included in the next, and still unannounced, Xbox game console.

Source: Kinect blog | Image via Microsoft