Kinect Windows SDK Released
Microsoft is set to kick off the Kinect for Windows SDK beta today, reports suggest.
Microsoft is expected to stream a special event at 9:30 PST (17:30 BST) to celebrate the release of Kinect for windows, according to site WinRumours.
It also lists the following features as being available to PC Kinect developers (they’re essentially Kinect’s basic capabilities):
• Robust Skeletal Tracking for high-performance capabilities that track the skeleton image of one or two persons moving within the Kinect field of view
• Advanced Audio Capabilities, including four-element microphone array with sophisticated acoustic noise and echo cancellation for great audio; beam formation to identify the current sound source and integration with the Windows speech recognition API also included
• XYZ depth camera for standard color camera stream access and depth data that indicates the distance of the object from the Kinect camera
Microsoft has been keen to support Kinect development on PC ever since bedroom programmers started cracking the motion sensor and creating all kinds of magic.
Today’s Kinect for Windows SDK beta, available from http://research.microsoft.com/kinectsdk, is for non-commercial use only. It is targeted at researchers, academics and hobbyists. Microsoft is still planning on delivering a commercial-use version of the SDK, executives said today, but they are still not saying when that will happen.
