Performance measurements for the Microsoft Kinect skeleton

The Microsoft Kinect for Xbox 360 ("Kinect") provides a convenient and inexpensive depth sensor and, with the Microsoft software development kit, a skeleton tracker (Figure 2). These have great potential to be useful as virtual environment (VE) control interfaces for avatars or for viewpoint control. In order to determine its suitability for our applications, we devised and conducted tests to measure standard performance specifications for tracking systems. We evaluated the noise, accuracy, resolution, and latency of the skeleton tracking software. We also measured the range in which the person being tracked must be in order to achieve these values.