[hnhg]

I read repeatedly that much of Kinect's software was derived from their in-house R&D. Is that not true?

[apu]

The computer vision aspects to the Kinect (and there are a lot, and very well done), were headed up by Andrew Blake at MS Research Cambridge, who's one of the foremost vision scientists in the world.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/ablake/

Most recently they have built the machine learning technology inside the Xbox Kinect human motion tracking system.

[ot]

It is true. Microsoft bought from PrimeSense the IR depth sensor technology, but all the body recognition/tracking software was developed by Microsoft Research.

[stevenbedrick]

I don't know specifics about Kinect, but I do know that MSR has done a ton of work on computer vision and its applications over the last ten or fifteen years, and I would be extremely surprised if that work didn't inform the efforts of whoever did invent Kinect.