I'm honoured to have someone reference my paper. While the kinect is fair game, it has a lot of unneeded aspects (such as the servo motor and the mircophones). We recently bought the asus xtion (found here
http://www.allsecurityelectronics.ne...KINPROL_d_A001) it has the same cameras as the kinect, but weighs (about) 3 times less.
If wanting to keep things simple, just go to walmart or some local store and buy a webcam for $10, no fancy mount required. Our mount for the kinect was a C channel with grip tape on the inside and zip ties.
And another paper will be up about my vision program from ultimate ascent before build season (we have a class at our school for independent research and my project is my vision program).