Microsoft Working to Quadruple Kinect Resolution

From DailyTech: Microsoft rolled out the Kinect accessory for the Xbox 360 back in November to rather lukewarm reviews. However, sales for the accessory have shot through the roof. The billions the company spent in ads for the console have wooed many gamers to try the device and the modding community has also caught onto the fact that the Kinect is massively hackable to do all sorts of things.

Right now, the resolution of the sensors used by the Kinect to monitor the player's movements is limited by the firmware to 320 x 240 at 30 frames per second. Since the resolution and all the features of the device are driven by firmware, upgrading the resolution and feature set of the Kinect is as easy as updating the Xbox dashboard.

Microsoft's Kinect team is working to increase the resolution of the depth sensor used to 640 x 480. If the update happens, the increase to 640 x 480 would effectively quadruple the accuracy of the sensor and allow the sensor the resolution needed to detect finger and hand rotation.

The reason the resolution wasn't cranked up by Microsoft to begin with was to allow for multiple USB devices to be used at one time. The USB controller interface inside the device is capable of 35MB/s but only uses about 16MB/s of that bandwidth.

Eurogamer reports that Microsoft is at work on a fix to get more bandwidth for the device. Microsoft had not given official comment on the story to Eurogamer. However, Rich Leadbetter from Digital Foundry said that such an update is "eminently doable." He also said, "[Microsoft would need to] disable or lower throughput of game installs running from USB flash drives to free up additional bandwidth."

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