Kinect for Xbox is one of our favorite technologies in recent times and with over 10 million units sold, our excitement about how this technology would shape our future has only increased. Today Microsoft has taken the Kinect’s magic a step further by announcing the Kinect for Windows SDK beta.
We believe we have already seen a hint of what this SDK can do during Ballmer’s lecture at IIT Delhi, but developers around the world now have the Kinect for Windows SDK to play with. This marks the (official) beginning of Natural User Interface (NUI) on Windows.
While still in beta, the SDK just requires developers to have the $150 Kinect sensor and the <100MB installation to get started with. The SDK gives developers raw sensor streams from Kinect, thus enabling skeletal tracking (getting skeleton image from the sensor area for up to two people), depth and color camera sensors along with advanced audio input that works with Windows speech recognition. In short the same amount of user tracking that any Kinect game gets. The tools for development aren’t alien either, C++, C#, or Visual Basic (Microsoft Visual Studio 2010).
The SDK is targetted at ‘academic and enthusiastic communities’ and is non-commercial. The commerical version would follow.
Microsoft is running a Kinect code camp at its HQ and 50 odd developers are busy innovating with the new SDK. Here is one of the litte creations at the camp (video)
Remember this was what I asked at Microsoft Mumbai office.