Microsoft Kinect used to map asteroids, glaciers, other scary things

Ken Mankoff is a PhD student on the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he studies ice and ocean interactions. He also counts himself among a growing legion of environmental scientists who’ve begun using Microsoft’s Kinect to create detailed, 3D maps of caves, glaciers or even asteroids. As Wired reports, the Kinect has garnered something of a cult following inside the scientific community, especially among those that , earlier, have relied upon comparatively dearer and sophisticated technologies to collect detailed 3D data. The approach du jour for many researchers is something often called Light Detection and varying ( LIDAR ) — a laser-based technology able to creating precise maps over relatively large areas. The Kinect, in contrast, can only see as much as 16 feet in front of itself, but at just $120, it’s significantly cheaper than the typical LIDAR system, which may run for anywhere between $10,000 and $200,000. It is also surprisingly accurate, able to capturing as much as 9 million data points per second.

Mankoff, for one, has already used the device to map a small cavern underneath a glacier in Norway, while Marco Tedesco, a hydrologist on the City College of recent York, is asking to glue a Kinect to a remote-controlled helicopter , within the hopes of measuring so-called meltwater lakes found on glaciers in the course of the summer. Then there’s Naor Movshovitz, also a PhD student at UC Santa Cruz, who’s more drawn to using the Kinect and its image processing software to determine how asteroids behave when broken up by a projectile. There are limitations, needless to say, because the device still has trouble performing amidst severe environmental conditions, though its supporters seem confident they’ll discover a solution. Read more on the source link below.