Kinect SDK 2.0 has significantly less functionality than 1.8?

Question

I miss several functionality that I belive was present in the previous SDK-s.

For example:

//Getting reference to sensor(s)
//Old (1.8)
sensor = KinectSensor.KinectSensors[0];
//New (2.0)
sensor = KinectSensor.GetDefault();
//
//the latter one does not support multiple sensors?

Also miss the option to use multiple sensors to track skeletons: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn188677.aspx Is this missing too?

Answer 1

With the new sensors, there are increased hardware requirements, making multiple sensors more difficult, as Carmine Sirignano reported.

Only one Kinect for Windows v2 sensor is supported. It is both a runtime and hardware issue of the system due to available USB3 bandwidth could only support one sensor. You would need a system with multiple USB3 host controllers in addition to those host controls on separate PCI Express 2.0 buses at a minimum.

And Wyck continues at the same link:

The Kinect uses a lot (more than half) of the available bus bandwidth to operate normally. So even though you could physically connect two or more sensors, there is no feasible way to have them both sustain enough of a data rate for them to operate normally using the existing hardware.

As a result of the hardware limitations, it appears that the runtime will only work with a single device, so the API was changed to reflect that.