Microsoft has released their Kinect For Windows SDK beta today. The Kinect is a motion based peripheral for the Xbox 360 that allows players to be the controller. The beta will allow anyone to plug their Kinect peripheral into a PC and use it to develop motion games. The SDK includes:
- Raw sensor streams - Access to raw data streams from the depth sensor, color camera sensor, and four-element microphone array enables developers to build upon the low-level streams that are generated by the Kinect sensor.
- Skeletal tracking - The capability to track the skeleton image of one or two people moving within the Kinect field of view make it easy to create gesture-driven applications.
- Advanced audio capabilities - Audio processing capabilities include sophisticated acoustic noise suppression and echo cancellation, beam formation to identify the current sound source, and integration with the Windows speech recognition API.
- Sample code and documentation - The SDK includes more than 100 pages of technical documentation. In addition to built-in help files, the documentation includes detailed walkthroughs for most samples provided with the SDK.
The Kinect has seen great success, selling over 10 million units since its release in November 2010 and was the key component in Microsoft's E3 2011 press conference earlier in June. Before Microsoft released the developer kit, people were using hacks to access the Kinect on their computers. They came up with a lot of ingenious ways to use the peripheral too, using the device with Minecraft, and with World Of Warcraft. Currently the SDK can only be used for non-commercial purposes, but Microsoft will release a commercial version in the future.
You can download the Kinect for Windows SDK beta here.
Are you going to be downloading the Kinect for Windows SDK and testing it out? Tell me below what kind of ideas you're thinking about trying with the kit.
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Comments
Displaying 1–6 of 6
Lord_Ruinous
I really hate motion controlled gaming but I like the idea of using Kinect to control my pc.
lucidity
Does this mean we can expect Kinect sales to spike? They already set the Guinness Book of World records for fastest selling consumer electronic device in history.
DPsx72
So the games can go from bad to worse? Honestly that's not much of a change, business as usual at M$.
cptpain
I was wondering when Microsoft was going to actually release an SDK seeing as how sometime ago they actually admit supporting people that are actually programming the device for use with the PC.
I really would like to see Kinect on a Mac as well.
I always thought of motion based gaming as not my cup of tea when used for console gaming, but if motion based PC gaming is around the corner, i could see this as something that would really revolutionize PC gaming.
I really like playing RTS games and using motion controls would really make me a happy camper.
I even like the idea of motion navigated UI's
looks like the whole "Iron Man" UI is coming to fruition.
Hellspoet
Finally it is possible, the Koreans now have a way to be faster at starcraft
RayDontPlay
I'm glad they are putting this out for everyone, seeing as people have been hacking the Kinect and making their own games for a while now. They want in on that market! Big ups!
Displaying 1–6 of 6