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Kinect SDK Beta is Now Available!

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https://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/kinectsdk/about.aspx

 

For those that haven’t heard the news, Microsoft Research released the Kinect SDK Beta for download today!  Here is a description from the research site:

“The Kinect for Windows SDK beta is a programming toolkit for application developers. It enables the academic and enthusiast communities easy access to the capabilities offered by the Microsoft Kinect device connected to computers running the Windows 7 operating system.

The Kinect for Windows SDK beta includes drivers, rich APIs for raw sensor streams and human motion tracking, installation documents, and resource materials. It provides Kinect capabilities to developers who build applications with C++, C#, or Visual Basic by using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.”

 

The SDK comes with the following features:

  • 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.

  • Easy installation

    The SDK installs quickly, requires no complex configuration, and the complete installer size is 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 outlets).

 

Very cool stuff!