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> The Kinect chips, designed by a team mostly based in Microsoft’s Silicon Valley office, use a technology called Time of Flight

I was under the impression that the (original) Kinect didn't actually use time of flight to get it's depth data. Can anyone comment on this?

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The original Kinect did not use time-of-flight technology, but projected a structured infrared light pattern and observed the displacement of the pattern to determine depth information. The Kinect that will ship with the Xbox One will use time-of-flight sensing (probably from the ZCam assets they bought with 3DV Systems).

Which is amazing since it removes the indoor constraint that the structure infrared light pattern approach had.

There are several projects out there that use kinects on robots in order to scan entire rooms, creating 3d maps of them [1][2].

There's also this [3], which isn't entirely related to TOF, but i think it's cool, and it uses a kinect. Sorry for my lapse in topicality.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aiNX-vpDhMo#at=19 [2] http://www.cs.nuim.ie/research/vision/data/rgbd2012/ [3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CbiOikirrg&feature=player_em...

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