Publish Kinect Depth information to a Ros Topic

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Hello, all,

Recently, we've been attempting to access the kinect depth data from the published point cloud provided by the openni_node, but we've run into a couple stumbling points:

first, the ros tutorial for pcl_ros

http://www.ros.org/wiki/pcl_ros/Tutor...

references a topic published by openni called: /camera/depth/points2 but our version of openni_kinect only publishes: /camera/depth/points Are we using an outdated version?

Also, we tried working with /camera/depth/points and we believe that this information is published in binary format. When we attempted to convert the binary format of a single point to x,y,z information though, we received a list of 4 integers. Are we interpreting the information incorrectly?

We also subscribed to the /camera/depth/image, and we could access the depth information from a single point, but we're restricted to meter-by-meter resolution. Is there a better way of getting more resolution with the /camera/depth/image ?

Thanks for reading, and we appreciate any directions you can point us to accessing the depth information (of points) from the kinect.

Sincerely,

Poofjunior