What's great about the Kinect is that it lets developers go after "3D computer vision" problems rather than "2D vision."
There's a wealth of techniques from computer graphics on dealing with 3D point clouds, whereas even basic things like background subtraction are still hard (and not completely robust) in the 2D vision world.
There's a wealth of techniques from computer graphics on dealing with 3D point clouds, whereas even basic things like background subtraction are still hard (and not completely robust) in the 2D vision world.