That makes sense for stereo and all that.
I did some experiments and although this camera didn’t work with the realsense driver, it does do ir, and as far as i can tell it does it in much the same way as the original kinect (the one for the 360). There are a set of ir leds around the sensor, and when using the ir video device these leds strobe. This makes the camera capture a sort of black and white heightmap: 
The framerate isn’t very good (a few Hz at most), and shiny things like glasses make the image all sorts of weird, but it definitely can do it, and it can do both an rgb stream and an ir stream at the same time.
With the right kind of opencv magic, this could definitely be something, but i get not wanting to spend time on it when there are actual depth cameras available.