So, the Kinect got a last minute change from corporate MS that completely ruined the device.
The Kinect SDK is insanely fast, accurate, and fun to use. This is because all of the processing for the IR and depth sensors/etc. was done on the physical Kinect device itself. it has its own processor to handle all of that. And it was lightning fast for what it needed to be. Imagine a kinect that instantly tracks your movements with sub-ms latency/lag. That's what the Kinect was supposed to be, and the SDK version of it was.
When they made the production/commercial version of it, someone high up without understanding the product thought that people would be able to hack into the Kinect and exploit it to steal MS's trade secrets and code for how it works if they could get access to the onboard CPU and memory of the device.
So they moved the processing for all the sensors into the XBox mainboard/CPU. This was further limited by a paltry amount of CPU/RAM given to any peripheral device so the rest could remain reserved for the game itself.
This completely ruined the device. It couldn't help but be laggy as fuck. it barely had any processing/compute time to handle the sensor data in a timely fashion.
Once again proving that corporate MBA fucks don't know what they're doing and shouldn't ever be allowed to tell engineers what to do or how to do it.
Edit: Developed a few custom games and products with the Kinect SDK over Unity3D and it was blazingly fast. This is how I know all this after doing some digging/research as to why the SDK experience was so wildly different from the commercial version.
