How does the Kinect use random forests?

Question

I read on this site that apparently the Kinect uses the random forests algorithm for machine learning in some way. Can anyone explain what it uses random forests for, and how their approach works?

Answer 1

It would appear that the random forest is used to predict movements of individual body parts. In this sense, predict does not mean "predict where the body part will move to" but "best guess the 3D location of the body parts". Here is an overview of the method.