Forum Discussion

kojack's avatar
kojack
MVP
6 years ago

Azure Kinect Depth Camera Announced


The Azure Kinect is a new dev kit from Microsoft featuring the sensors from the Hololens 2.
It's half the size of the Kinect 2 and features:
- 7 microphone array
- 1MP time of flight depth camera
- 12MP RGB camera
- IMU (accel & gyro) with 1.6kHz sample rate and 208Hz reporting to pc
- support for Azure based cloud processing of data (but Azure not required to use it)
- sync in and out ports to daisy chain multiple Kinects so they can work together without interfering with each other.

It can do 4K RGB at 30Hz.
It's depth camera can do modes such as:
- 320x288x30Hz  FOV:75x65  Range:5.46m
- 512x512x30Hz FOV:120x120  Range:2.88m
- 1024x1024x15Hz  FOV:120x120  Range:2.21m
and a couple more in between.

Unfortunately none of it's RGB camera modes (there's 6) support 60Hz.

It's launching in June 27 for $400us.

The raw sensor data and body tracking sdks aren't available yet, so I don't know the specs for body tracking (which is the most potentially useful part for Rift owners).
I'm looking at it more for it's depth scanning ability. I like my Zed Mini, but it needs a powerful system to run and it's single frame depth scan is lacking.



I guess the main downside for me is that it's only suitable for environments of 10 to 25 degrees C, which means Australia will kill it.


5 Replies

  • DaftnDirect's avatar
    DaftnDirect
    MVP
    6 years ago
    Just reading about this (and HoloLens 2). That temp range is surprisingly limited.
  • kojack's avatar
    kojack
    MVP
    6 years ago
    At least it's a dev kit that is designed to be opened and modified, so we can add a fan I guess. Although that might affect the 7 microphones.

    The 2.21m range for 1024x1024 depth is rather limited too. The Kinect 2 had trouble tracking skeletons closer than 1.5m, and had a depth range of 8m.

  • kevinw729's avatar
    kevinw729
    Honored Visionary
    6 years ago
    Since Microsoft decided to allow Azure its freedom (post XBone issues), the company has had their tech focused on Enterprise, a number of amusement systems and attractions use the Azure Kinect platform, as well as service and control products. Its great seeing the new Azure Kinect making it back to the consumer scene, though I think the new platform will still be heavily focused on Enterprise.
  • kojack's avatar
    kojack
    MVP
    6 years ago
    I went to order one.
    But they are only accepting orders from the US. :(
    That's not stated anywhere that I could find, you need to make it to the delivery address part of the checkout process before the country block happens.