The new Kinect is kind of awesome. Just by the numbers, it's a huge upgrade. You can see (most of) the full walkthrough we saw just a bit ago here at Microsoft's Redmond campus in the video above. Parts are jaw-dropping.

The demo is of a live action Kinect unit, which will be included with the new Xbox One. Right from the start, you can see the improved depth sensor. It's three times as sensitive, and can pick out bits as small as your t-shirt wrinkling or adjusting on your chest. The 60-degree-larger field of view helps here as well (up to six people can be on screen at once), and it has a deeper field of (accurate view, too).

And oh man, the IR sensing. It's seeing in a pitch black room! That is, like, totally absurd. And should be cool for using the Kinect at night, or for horror games, where you don't want to play in a well-lit room. Or just, you know, watching any movie ever.

The new 1080p cameras are a wide field of view, which we saw in greater detail during the Skype demo with four chat partners, and looks great, but no one's too concerned about that.

The truly impressive stuff, though, comes from the brains of the Kinect. Its improved skeleton mapping is crazy accurate, and can track your individual hand motions and shoulder shrugs. The muscle tracker is also borderline ridiculous. It can tell what parts of your body have pressure on them. It knows where you're putting your weight as you lean side to side, and how much power goes into each motion, by tracking speed. It knows if you lob a slow fake punch, and it knows if you slice a fast uppercut through the air, and shows you with popping white circles around your fists or feet or head. Orientation tracking is cool as well, and will apply more to how your character moves around in games.

The heart rate monitor, which reads your heart rate just by freaking LOOKING AT YOU, seems pretty accurate, but we obviously weren't able to test against an actual heart monitor. Still, do you see this, guys, seriously this is a thing that will be in living rooms. It's very cool.

The face recognition recognizes you, personally, and can tell if you're "engaged" or not engaged, meaning if you say "Xbox pause" while not looking at the TV, it won't listen to you. This seems like something you'd maybe want to turn off, but it's still impressive it can read your expression and know if you're happy, sad, or bored.

Kinect 2 doesn't just see you, though; it can hear you too. In fact, it can hear your voice, specifically, through whatever ambient game and/or movie noise that's going on around you. Want to give a command in the middle of a particularly loud concert video or melee? You don't have to shout for Kinect 2 to listen and comply.

Calling this feature set impressive is an undersell. It's breakthrough technology on many levels, with applications far beyond watching content or playing games. It's the future, and we all get to see it today.

微软在xbox发布会上发布了新一代的kinect：

下面部分内容来自 http://www.cvchina.info/2013/05/23/kinect2/

1：使用TOF代替结构光（精度大约提高了3倍）
v评：主动光再怎么改进终究是主动光，逃避不了的互相干扰，能耗都较大，精度无法提高到与现在的工业cmos相比。

2：usb3.0接口
v评：不知道是不是 usb3.0 v2

3：1080p的rgb摄像头。
v评：如果说提高分辨率是一个主要特性的话，我觉得提供控制对焦、光圈大小更有意义，因为做到图像必然需要。

4：能区分手掌和拇指。

5：能提供更准确的关节的朝向。

Gizmodo的演示视频值得一看。

ExtremeTech的一些分析。

Wired的拆解

Wired的视屏