Kinect for Windows SDK Preview in Motion -- Visual Studio Magazine

Kinect for Windows SDK Preview in Motion

Now that Kinect for Windows 2.0 devices have shipped, a preview of the software development kit is available for more than game developers.

By Michael Domingo
07/31/2014

The Kinect for Windows team released a preview of its Kinect for Windows 2.0 software development kit (SDK) earlier this month. The preview coincided with the release of Kinect for Windows 2.0 sensors, a device that is being targeted at commercial developers who want to add voice, gesture, and movement features to business and consumer apps for sale through the Windows Store.

The Kinect for Windows SDK preview improves upon skeletal orientation features, with an increase in the number of people it can track (6) and the skeletal joints it can track per person (25), touts a blog from the Kinect for Windows team. The blog also cites support for cross-development platform, including support for the Unity game development platform. The SDK also has a feature that allows for development without the need for a Kinect sensor present, as well as a custom gesture builder. Also improved is face tracking, capturing facial features with a more life-like appearance.

The Kinect for Windows SDK 2.0 can be downloaded here.

The Kinect for Windows 2.0 device itself has been improved, with more refined skeletal orientation, 1080p HD video support and new active infrared features. It's U.S.$199, and can be purchased here or at select retail outlets.

For developers who are just getting into Kinect development, Microsoft recommends the "Programming for Kinect for Windows 2.0 Jumpstart" course, available through the Microsoft Virtual Academy.

About the Author

You Tell 'Em, Readers: If you've read this far, know that Michael Domingo, Visual Studio Magazine Editor in Chief, is here to serve you, dear readers, and wants to get you the information you so richly deserve. What news, content, topics, issues do you want to see covered in Visual Studio Magazine? He's listening at [email protected].

Printable Format

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

Cloud-Focused .NET Aspire 9.1 Released

Along with .NET 10 Preview 1, Microsoft released.NET Aspire 9.1, the latest update to its opinionated, cloud-ready stack for building resilient, observable, and configurable cloud-native applications with .NET.
Microsoft Ships First .NET 10 Preview

Microsoft shipped .NET 10 Preview 1, introducing a raft of improvements and fixes across performance, libraries, and the developer experience.
C# Dev Kit Previews .NET Aspire Orchestration

Microsoft's dev team has been busy updating the C# Dev Kit, a Visual Studio Code extension that enhances the C# development experience by providing tools for managing, debugging, and editing C# projects.
Hands On: New VS Code Insiders Build Creates Web Page from Image in Seconds

New Vision support with GitHub Copilot in the latest Visual Studio Code Insiders build takes a user-supplied mockup image and creates a web page from it in seconds, handling all the HTML and CSS.
Naive Bayes Regression Using C#

Dr. James McCaffrey from Microsoft Research presents a complete end-to-end demonstration of the naive Bayes regression technique, where the goal is to predict a single numeric value. Compared to other machine learning regression techniques, naive Bayes regression is usually less accurate, but is simple, easy to implement and customize, works on both large and small datasets, is highly interpretable, and doesn't require tuning any hyperparameters.