Hi

IPI soft looks like a nice app, and i`m interested in using it but since i don`t have kinect i can not yet try it out.. Anyways, one of the things that i will like to know is this:

-What`s the maximun space where i can move and still be capture by the two kinects with IPI Recorder with out any problem?

Thanks
Best Regards

Hi, Christopher

For 1 or 2 Kinects, the capture area is about 7x7 feet (2x2 meters). Use of second Kinect doesn't enlarge capture area, but improves capture quality and allows to capture more complex movements. You can find info about maximum capture area and required space for different camera configurations on the Products page of our website http://ipisoft.com/products.php.

With this said, is there any way, by going to a 4 kinect set up (possible with the Kinect 4Windows units) and gaining a larger capture space or no?

Thanks for the information

Hi

Currently, our software does not support 4 Kinects configuration. There is a number of problems arising in that case:

1. The more Kinects, the more infrared emitters, the greater interference, the worse input quality.

2. To enlarge total capture volume, cameras must be placed in such a way that intersections of individual capture volumes are smaller. And it's much more complicated to get good calibration results in this situation.

3. To connect all 4 Kinects to single computer, at least 2 additional USB controllers are needed. And that's (almost) totally impossible for laptops. And still, if you've managed to connect them, there may be a trouble with bandwidth of internal PCI bus. For example, when we tested 3 ASUS Xtions connected to a desktop, we experienced frame rate instability with RGB images.

4. The required write speed for uncompressed depth+RGB of 4 kinects (640x480@30) is about 175 MB/s. This is (almost) sure an SSD. And this goes through PCI bus along with camera streams (see previous list item). You can lower throughput by enabling image compression, but that brings heavy load on CPU, which can lead to frame drops. Of course, for now you can disable RGB recording, but in future we plan to use them for advanced capture techniques.

5. Previous two problems lead us to the need of using multiple computers for recording. For motion analysis, records from different computers must be synchronized. And again, accomplishing this task is not such easy.

Certainly, we'll conduct a research in this direction in the future and try to make such configuration possible.