Kinect for Windows news gets new address, keeps same great community
For the past several years, this blog has brought you news about the latest Kinect for Windows technology and its innovative applications in medicine, education, manufacturing, retailing, performance art, and more. We’ve been awed by the creative ways in which the developer community has harnessed Kinect for Windows to build solutions that allow users to interact naturally with computing technology.
Earlier this year, we reported that developers would soon be able to read Kinect’s RGB, IR, and depth data with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update and a Kinect driver update. (Kinect’s microphone data was already available to the Windows 10 UWP audio and speech recognition APIs). And, as explained in this Windows Developer blog post, we are pleased to announce the availability of these functionalities—along with the much-requested ability to access Kinect skeletal tracking data. You can find code samples at GitHub as part of the Windows universal samples, and you can download the latest Kinect driver from your computer’s Device Manager.
With the Windows 10 APIs and the new driver, developers can incorporate Kinect functionality into Universal Windows Platform (UWP) applications. Moreover, these same APIs will handle rich data from other sensors, provided you have the appropriate driver.
Now that these capabilities have been implemented in Windows 10, it only seems fitting to fold Kinect for Windows news into the Windows Developer blog, at https://blogs.windows.com/buildingapps/. Beginning today, that’s where you can keep abreast of the current developments in human-computer interactions—and how you can use Kinect for Windows functionality to create solutions that will run across the entire UWP ecosystem.
As part of this effort to consolidate your sources for developer information, we are also merging Kinect for Windows social media with the Windows Developer Facebook and Twitter accounts. The Kinect for Windows Facebook and Twitter accounts will remain open until Nov 15th, 2016, but now would be a good time to start following the Windows Dev accounts for the latest info about developing UWP apps.
And of course, now is also the ideal time to hop on over to our new home on the Windows Developer blog and add it to your favorites. And as always, we’re eager to hear from you, so please join the conversation at the Kinect for Windows v2 SDK forum.
Happy developing!
The Kinect for Windows Team
Key links