I have been trying to find a good sensor to use to replace our existing mixture of PrimeSense Carmine 1.08b and 1.09 sensors. These are high-quality short- and long-range structured light sensors that are unfortunately no longer on the market. In the past, I have used these sensors for object detection.

The options are:

• Intel RealSense F200: a tiny short range sensor. Does not seem to be able to compute depth for black objects, so it’s not an option.
• Microsoft Xbox 360 Kinect: old, but we have a ton of them. Unfortunately the OpenNI drivers for our sensors seem to die intermittently, they’re low resolution, and the color is a bit off.
• Microsoft Xbox One Kinect: shiny new sensors with high resolution. There appears to be some weird hardware smoothing – not an issue on big objects, but rules them out for smaller objects (see comparison with 360 here.
• Intel RealSense R200: another great sensor I wrote about before. Unfortunately, as of right now, the drivers work very poorly on our Ubuntu 14.04 machine.

This playlist shows a comparison of the Kinect for Xbox One and the RealSense R200 with the Kinect for Xbox 360. All in all, we decided to stick with the PrimeSense Carmines for now.

Hopefully one day the software issues with the R200 and Kinect One will be resolved.