Thursday, April 14, 2011

Kinect SDK Coming To Windows Spring 2011



Microsoft has created this landing page for the upcoming Kinect SDK. It looks official now(although they can always change plans later, which I hope they don’t). Microsoft's Kinect has been quite a hit with very good sales for the XBOX 360, and Microsoft was never committed to a PC release. Since the release of Kinect, some enterprising people on the interwebs have been able to hack a working device driver for the Kinect to get it working for the PC. There’s been a few really cool hacks made for the Kinect such as this. With a proper SDK, I’m sure we’ll get much better Kinect cool tech prototypes. For non commercial use of course.


With this SDK, you’ll be able to take advantage of:

  • The latest advances in audio processing, which include a four-element microphone array with sophisticated acoustic noise and echo cancellation for crystal clear audio.
  • Sound source localization for beamforming, which enables the determination of a sound’s spatial location, enhancing reliability when integrated with the Microsoft speech recognition API.
  • Depth data, which provides the distance of an object from the Kinect camera, as well as the raw audio and image data, which together open up opportunities for creating richer natural user interface experiences.
  • Highly performant and robust skeletal tracking capabilities for determining the body positions of one or two persons moving within the Kinect field of view.
  • Documentation for the APIs and a description of the SDK architecture.
  • Sample code that demonstrates how to use the functionality in the SDK.

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