Technical notes

Kinect resolution and height above model

Kinect v2 resolution is 512 x 424 points and its resolution is 70.6 x 60 degrees. Given the height h above the model, we can compute the distance a between two scanned points:

a = h * tan((70.6/512) * pi/180)

So for example for height 0.7 m above the model, the resolution is 1.7 mm. In Tangible Landscape plugin, we usually use 2 or 3 mm. If we want to keep resulting raster resolution higher than the Kinect resolution supports, we can switch on interpolation instead of binning (in the main scanning tab). Interpolation will avoid white (no data) pixels, but scanning cycle takes little longer.

Given the size of our model s, we can compute the ideal height h above the model to achieve best resolution (utilizing the full resolution):

h = max(0.5, s / (2 * tan (35*pi/180)))

where the 0.5 is distance in meters, which is the minimum for scanning.