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Comment by BananaRepublic | Hacker News Reader

Well, Kinect owes quite alot to PrimeSense so I certainly wouldn't categorize it as a 'MS Research' product.

Balance. In seeking to lift one group you cast aside another hard working group of people. Certainly PrimeSense contributed much, but to discount the hard work of those in MS Research as something less by wrapping them in quotes only serves to despoil your message. You commit that which you wish to redress.

See what Johnny Chung Lee said of his time there for a more balanced look of the records.

Ehh, given how much Kinect relies on the functionality offered by PrimeSense, I'd think it would rather be UNBALANCED to claim it to come from MS Research.

The Kinect only relies on Prime Sense in the form of their hardware. All the algorithms and software are entirely developed by MS Research. This point is made more clear by the fact that Microsoft didn't acquire exclusive rights from Prime Sense but is instead banking on the superiority of their algorithms.

I've played around with the Kinect, and without Microsoft's code, all you really get from the hardware is a depth image (think an RGB image with distance from camera for each pixel instead of intensity). Everything else is developed by Microsoft, and it is not an easy feat.

Prime Sense developed their own software for pose detection and tracking, but it is inferior to the XBox360 implementation.

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