Kinect Weighs Astronauts Just By Looking At Them

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The Kinect can calculate an astronaut's weight in zero gravity just by looking at them. Just imagine what this means for all us couch potatoes that use the Kinect to select movies on Netflix?

ASTRONAUTS will soon be able to stay fit thanks to a body tracking camera system built into Microsoft's Kinect gaming sensor, which helps calculate their weight in zero gravity. Even during missions that last just a few weeks spacefarers can lose up to 15 per cent of their body mass because their muscles atrophy due to lack of use. To prevent this physical decline, crew aboard the International Space Station (ISS) typically spend 2 hours exercising per day.
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I can calculate an astronaut's weight in zero gravity too: nil. His or her mass, on the other hand, that's a different story.
 
Ok I'll show my ignorance here, but aren't bodies weightless in zero gravity?
 
It can find your terrestrial weight while in space. You may be weightless there, but you would like to know how it compares to what you weigh while on Earth.
 
I think there's other awesome use for Kinect, like calculating how fast an object moves in space, say a meteor.
 
BDS23 said:
I think there's other awesome use for Kinect, like calculating how fast an object moves in space, say a meteor.
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The way a Kinect senses motion, it wouldn't be able to do that. There's a reason why it has an effective range of a couple meters. The resolution on it isn't even very good.

The only reason why the Kinect is so popular with these kinds of projects is because it's cheap and it has an SDK, whereas if you were to take two high def webcams, the cost would be double or triple, and, even though it would technically be far superior, you would have to code absolutely everything from scratch.
 
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