Maximum number of Kinect for Windows v2 Cameras on one PC?

Question

There is a question about the previous iteration of the Microsoft Kinect for Windows (no longer on sale) here: https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/63c7c52e-1290-452e-8e04-74330822d16f/maximum-number-of-kinect-cameras-on-one-pc?forum=kinectsdk.
How many Kinect for Windows v2 sensors can be used on a single PC? And if this is limited to 1, is this a software, or a hardware restriction?

Answer 1

Are there plans for this to change, or be lifted?
No.  No product roadmap anyway.
The reasoning requires you to look at it from an engineering standpoint.  The Kinect uses a lot (more than half) of the available bus bandwidth to operate normally.  So even though you could physically connect two or more sensors, there is no feasible
way to have them both sustain enough of a data rate for them to operate normally using the existing hardware.
I'm no hardware expert, but from what I have been told, the solution is harder than just having multiple USB 3.0 controllers in the same PC.
As for "plans for this to change", rest assured that people want this, and that there are clever engineers thinking about solutions, but due to technical limitations, there is no product roadmap yet that allows for multiple kinects sensors on a
single PC.  And because of the technological limitations, it will never just be "lifted".  The hardware needs to change for this to work.
Another thing to consider is that, from a physics standpoint, Kinects
do interfere with each other (slightly) when operating in the same space.  It's not at all dissimilar from two people trying to have a conversation in the same room -- some words of the conversation will be missed.  The more people in the
room, the more difficult it is to hear one another.  For the Kinect, the quality of the depth results, for example, is diminished by having two kinects operating in the same space, but the visible light cameras continue to operate unimpeded.  The
sensor is cleverly designed to "tolerate" the light patterns from other kinects, but they can't completely ignore those patterns and conflicts do occur --  so it
does degrade slightly with noise from each additional sensor.  It's using invisible light, so the problem tends to be "out of sight, out of mind" for us as users.  But at some (modest) limit, it becomes mathematically impossible
to multiplex the light patterns from additional Kinects using the current specs (somewhere around 16 kinects based on the patterns, IIRC).
So there are other physical and technological hurdles to overcome with operating multiple Kinects in the same space, even if they were all connected to different PCs connected in a network cluster or something like that.