Microsoft has officially released the Kinect for Windows Software Development Kit, allowing developers to take advantage of the motion sensing technology in Windows 7.

“The Kinect for Windows SDK opens up a world of possibilities to developers who want to unleash the power of Kinect technology on Windows,” said Anoop Gupta, distinguished scientist, Microsoft Research. “We can’t wait to see what this community will create as we work together to build more natural, intuitive computing experiences.”

The Kinect for Windows SDK, which works with Windows 7, includes not just drivers drivers, but also APIs, device interfaces, installer documents and resource materials. The SDK provides "Kinect capabilities to developers building applications with C++, C# or Visual Basic using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010."

Features of the Kinect SDK include the following:

• Raw Sensor Streams. Developers have access to raw data streams from depth sensor, color camera sensor and the four-element microphone array. These will allow them to build upon the low-level streams generated by the Kinect sensor.
• Skeletal Tracking. The SDK has the capability to track the skeleton image of one or two people moving within the Kinect field of view, making it possible to create gesture-driven applications.
• Advanced Audio Capabilities. Audio processing capabilities include sophisticated noise suppression and echo cancellation, beam formation to identify the current sound source, and integration with the Windows speech recognition API.
• Ease of installation. The SDK quickly installs in a standard way for Windows 7 with no complex configuration required and a complete installer size of less than 100 MB. Developers can get up and running in just a few minutes with a standard standalone Kinect sensor unit widely available at retail.
• Extensive documentation. The SDK includes more than 100 pages of high-quality technical documentation. In addition to built-in help files, the documentation includes detailed walkthroughs for most samples provided with the SDK.

A commercial version of the SDK is slated to arrive later this year. At this year's E3, Microsoft have revealed that they are planning to include the Kinect technology in all of their first-party games. You can download the SDK here.

Tweet

This story sucks? This story rocks!

Vote Now!    (0) (0)