Microsoft’s Kinect Sensor is a nice peace of Hardware and considerably cheap for a camera that also provides a 640×480 depth image. Soon after it appeared on the market in November 2010, it was reverse engineered for users to interface it from the computer without the Xbox 360.

Technology Enthusiasts and Roboticists all over the world picked up a Kinect to see what they can do with it. My personal motivation is to improve Perception for my Service Robot. Shortly after the publication of the Kinect Hack, Microsoft and PrimeSense decided to release an official SDK: the OpenNI Framework.

• The OpenKinect Project – http://openkinect.org
• OpenNI – http://www.openni.org/

Below are the first Depth Images and User Tracking Images, that I took with the official SDK.