Hasta La Gadget!

As sure as night follows day, and a greasy, carbohydrate-laden breakfast follows a drunken night out, so iFixit has followed the launch of Microsoft’s new Kinect by tearing one apart and photographing the metal and plastic cadaver.

The Kinect, which went on sale yesterday, is a controller-free controller for the Xbox 360. It sits atop your TV and beams infra-red into the room with its projector, and then uses cameras to track where you, your face and your limbs are, allowing you to control the on-screen action.

So, what’s inside? First, the whole sensor-bar sits on a motorized base so it can follow you around (creepy). This contains some crappy plastic gears which will doubtless wear down soon enough. On the other hand, if you have a games-room big enough that the Kinect actually needs to swivel, you can probably afford regular replacements.

The circuit-board is split into three parts, stacked up to it in the log, narrow Kinect, and the the cameras peek from one side. There are two cameras, both big webcam-style autofocus models: the infrared one has a resolution of 320 x240 and the RGB camera has 640 x 480 pixels.

There are also four microphones, pointing in various directions. The Kinect calibrates to the room you are in, taking into account the way the sound bounces off walls and furniture in order to properly recognize your voice commands.

There is one oddity inside the Kinect: a fan, in a machine that consumes a mere 12 Watts. IFixit speculates that Microsoft was burned (literally?) by the dreaded and infamous Red Ring of Death on the Xbox, and is now being over-cautious. Either that or it just likes adding noise to your living room to annoy you, kind of like a physical incarnation of the hated Clippy.

Microsoft Kinect Teardown [iFixit. Thanks, Kyle!]

See Also:

• Gadget Lab Podcast: Xbox Kinect, Wired's Fall Test, Skyfire …
• Video: Microsoft Makes Post-Natal Impression with Kinect Star Wars …
• How Motion Detection Works in Xbox Kinect
• Kinect Not Colorblind, Some Testers Find