Kinect for Windows v2 · Linux · macOS · Windows

A cross-platform C++ driver for streaming color, infrared, and depth over USB 3.0, with color-to-depth registration and accelerated processing pipelines including Metal on Apple Silicon.

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Warning: This project supports the Kinect for Windows v2 sensor (K4W2), not Kinect v1 or Xbox 360 sensors. If you are unsure which hardware you have, start with Kinect v1 versus Kinect v2.

Choose your path

Install the driver

Set up the USB driver, dependencies, optional accelerators, and build tools for your platform.

macOS · Linux · Windows

Capture your first frames

Build Protonect, open a device, receive synchronized frame sets, and register color into depth space.

Follow Getting Started →

Solve a device problem

Diagnose enumeration, USB bandwidth, permissions, stalled streams, and unavailable processing backends.

Open troubleshooting →

Look up the API

Browse public functionality by topic or jump directly to the complete class reference.

Topics · Classes

What you can build

Live RGB, IR, and depth
Stream all Kinect v2 camera outputs through one device API.

Registered point clouds
Map between depth, color, and metric 3-D coordinates.

Portable processing
Choose CPU, Metal, OpenGL, OpenCL, CUDA, VA-API, and platform JPEG backends.

Offline workflows
Record raw streams, replay them, and apply explicit calibration profiles.

Find every guide

The Guides page is the complete catalog for installation, configuration, timing, calibration, registration, recording, Python, performance, protocol, quality, migration, and contributor material. The same categories are always available from the Guides menu and the navigation tree.

Project scope

This documentation is written for application developers who need images or 3-D data from a Kinect v2 and for maintainers extending the driver. Familiarity with C++, camera calibration, or 3-D geometry is useful for the deeper guides, but is not required for Getting Started.

The library does not implement firmware updates, Kinect SDK body/skeleton tracking, or calibrated directional audio. Linux can expose the raw microphone array through ALSA; see Frequently asked questions. USB 3.0 controller and driver differences can still affect reliability, so production deployments should follow Troubleshooting and Test plan.

Source, issue tracking, and contributions live at https://github.com/hbmartin/libfreenect2-metal.