Since the Primesense Carmine 1.09 close range camera was pulled from the market I've been trying to figure out a replacement for my boxing robot. 

I need skeleton tracking and close range. Standard Kinect/Asus doesn't quite work up close but the 1.09 camera did. 

I got the Structure.io camera to work with NITE 2 for skeleton tracking but it also doesn't work as well up close as I hoped. 

There's no skeleton tracking for the Creative Labs Senz3D yet so that's out. I've looked at some other lesser known RGB-D cameras and they didn't have linux support yet. 

So I'm left with a single option. The Kinect for Windows 2 camera. The camera is amazing and the SDK blows away what could be done with NITE. But... it's Windows 8 only. The open source KFW drivers are just not there yet. No skeleton support, etc. 

The options I see are:

a) Run ROS entirely under Windows 8 though there doesn't seem to be very good support. 
b) Run Ubuntu/Hydro in Virtualbox and send messages (Kinect quaternions) through the virtualbox api and turn that into a ROS message.
c) Run ROS in Windows as a slave node to a master ROS node running in Ubuntu. 

If I just want to run ROS Hydro in Windows for sending some Kinect quaternion/TF frames over the network to Ubuntu/Hydro for the rosqt, etc heavy lifting is that possible? 

Any other suggestions? 

--
Chris Jones
Overthrow Robotics
chris.jones@overthrowrobotics.com
310-400-0256