I don't know specifics about Kinect, but I do know that MSR has done a ton of work on computer vision and its applications over the last ten or fifteen years, a

I don't know specifics about Kinect, but I do know that MSR has done a ton of work on computer vision and its applications over the last ten or fifteen years, and I would be extremely surprised if that work didn't inform the efforts of whoever did invent Kinect.