Will Kinect v2 support multiple sensors?

Question

Working with multiple Kinect v1 sensors is very difficult because of the IR interference between the sensors.

Based on what I read on this gamastura article, Microsoft got rid of the interference problem with the time-of-flight mechanism that Kinect v2 sensor uses to gauge depth.

Does that mean I could use multiple Kinect v2 sensors at the same time, or did I misunderstand the article?

Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

I asked this question, in person, of the dev team at the meetup in San Francisco in April. The answer I got was:

"This feature is 3+ months away. We want to prioritize single-Kinect features before working on multiple Kinects."

I'm a researcher, and my goal is to have a bunch of odd setups, so this is a frustrating answer, but I understand that they need to prioritize usage that will be immediately useful to a larger market.

Could you connect them to multiple computers and stream data back and forth?

Answer 2

As @escapecharacter mentioned not likely to have support for multiple kinect v2 sensors in the very near future.

I can also confirm, one of the Kinect V2 SDK samples has this comment:

// for Alpha, one sensor is supported
this.kinectSensor = KinectSensor.Default;

I think the hardware itself is capable of avoiding the interference problem. Hopefully the slightly larger amount of data (higher res RGB stream) won't be a problem with multiple sensors(and available USB bandwidth) and it would be a matter of enabling the SDK to safely handle multiple sensor instances in the future.

I wouldn't expect a fast/quick update to the SDK enabling though, so in the meantime, although not ideal you could try either:

• Using multiple V2 sensors on multiple machines communicating over a local network, passing only processed/minimal data (to keep the delay as small as possible)
• Using multiple V1 sensors using Shake'n'Sense (pdf link to paper) to reduce interference

At least you would to a certain extent make some progress testing some of your assumptions for your project with multiple sensors, and update the project when the updated SDK is out.