Thu, Jun 16, 2011 | 17:57 BST

Rumor no more – Microsoft releases Kinect for Windows SDK

Microsoft has announced that the Kinect for Windows SDK is now available as a free download from Microsoft Research.

The beta download, which you can get here, includes drivers, APIs, device interfaces, installation documents, resource materials, and more to build applications with C++, C#, or Visual Basic by using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.

This SDK includes 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).

This SDK is designed for non-commercial purposes only; a commercial version is expected to be available at a later date.

It was rumored earlier this morning that the SDK would be released today.

9 comments

Droid
16/06/11, 5:59 pm

Better late than never I suppose. I could have sworn that Microsoft said, before Kinect had even been named, that it was going to be made available from day one for PC users. Dreams of Minority Report style desktops were shattered until this day.