Neowin reports that a Microsoft Research team has managed to transform cameras, including a regular webcam and a smartphone shooter, into depth-sensing, Kinect-like devices

It looks like Microsoft Research is having a lot of fun with cameras these days. Not only have they stabilized your unusable GoPro footage and made something awesome with it, now they’re transforming your smartphone into a full-fledged Kinect.

Microsoft has been working on ways to make any regular 2D camera capture depth, meaning it could do some of the same things a Kinect does. As you can see in the video below the team managed to pull this off and we might see this tech all around in the near future.

  Microsoft turns (almost) any camera into a Kinect