Does Kinect work with a projector?

Solution 1:

Works fine in my projector setup. The projector is on a shelf about 8 feet up, the xbox is below it, and the Kinect is about 10 feet in front of these on a 3 foot stand. The 9 foot diagonal projector screen is above and behind the Kinect sensor. I have no issues other than the absurd $50 price for the powered Kinect USB extension I needed.

Added top-down diagram of room. Remember projector is way, way above the kinect -- 8 feet vs 3 feet.

Solution 2:

The same question has been asked on the XBox forum. The consensus there seems to be that as long as the light from the projector isn't pointing directly at the infra-red sensor you should be OK.

There's a link to a video on Gamespot which shows a set up with projector (though I haven't got the video to load so I can't verify this).

The topic starter has reported back

Hey everyone.

Just wanted to report back that I've set everything up and it works perfectly. The only thing you have to watch for is where you stand, obviously, so that you don't interfere with the projection onto the screen.

So it looks like you should be good to go.

Solution 3:

Unless your projector spits out a lot of light in the infrared, you shouldn't have an issue positioning the kinect facing the projector.

Distance sensing on the kinect works by projecting a field of dots in the infrared (you can actually view the field through an infrared camera, seen here), then detecting the pattern of dots with an infrared camera placed at a precise distance from the source and calculating a distance measurement with some fancy trigonometry.

Assuming your projector doesn't spit out lots of light in the infrared, it'll essentially be invisible to the sensor, despite the fact that it's very bright to you. I'm sort of speculating since I don't actually have a kinect hooked up with a projector, but if my assumptions are correct, this should work.