Evaluation and comparison of the Kinect, the Xtion and the LEAP (Hardware and Software)

Is the productive use of controlling applications via Hand gestures already suitable? A practical comparison of the possible productive usage of the Microsoft Kinect in contrast to the newer Asus Xtion Pro. Our Use Case is to control applications with up to five fingers and gestures known from devices like the iPad, but without touching anything.

In this Masterproject, Arkadius Weister and Stanislas Mauser work on an application, based on our first test run “the FacePuzzle version 2 application”, that use Motion Sensing devices to control other applications like a tomography visualizer or a simple image viewer application. The core idea is to translate the gestures to ordinary Multi-Touch gestures and works like a layer over the third party application.

In this Project we want to analyze, whether the available technical Hardware is already suitable for productive working. Therefore we develop an own software solution, written in C# under usage of the OpenNI SDK. We use especially the OpenNI SDK to be able to use the Kinect and the Xtion with the same application.
Moreover for this evaluation question we compare multiple Motion Sense devices. Our primary focus is on the Microsoft Kinect and the Asus Xtion Pro, but beyond these two devices we added the new Leap controller to our project scope. By adding the Leap device to our scope, we are able to compare two variations of the PrimeSense technology, with just different technical specifications and a totally other implementation of recording gestures.

Remark: The Xtion Pro camera is faster than the Kinect and has a higher resolution. But both have the PrimeSense technology inside. At this time, we don´t know how the Leap device technically is implemented.

So the hope is, to give any answer to the question: We need better hardware of PrimeSense devices? We need totally other devices like the Leap? Or a good software implementation with our availably hardware is already sufficiently?

On These questions and more we two want to move on the next few months!