Last week, it was my pleasure to present at the Roanoke .NET User Group on the Kinect SDK for Windows beta. In the presentation, I demonstrated the application I created for last summer’s Mid Atlantic Developer Expo, which used the Kinect to provide both skeletal tracking to move the mouse and select items, and also used speech recognition for easier access to items on the page. The application also demonstrated interoperation between the WPF host application, which handled speech recognition via Kinect, and a client web page, which used a nifty JavaScript library called isotope.js to provide snazzy animations and sorting/filtering. You can read more about that project, and view a video demo here.

I wanted to thank the folks in Roanoke for inviting me. I also wanted to provide a link to the slides, code, and resource links from my presentation. You can download a ZIP file with these resources here.

In my presentation, I mentioned that the folks at Microsoft Robotics have enabled Kinect-integrated robots. In fact, with the newly-available Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4 beta, you don’t even need to have a robot. You can start your development using the built-in simulator along with your Kinect sensor, and when you’re ready to go for the hardware route, the Microsoft Robotics team has provided a specification for a robotics platform integrating Kinect. The first implementation of this specification, “Eddie” from Parallax, Inc, is now available for pre-order.

But the cool news doesn’t stop there. My colleague Alfred Thompson notes that the 2012 FIRST Robotics Competition will allow the use of Kinect for controlling robots. Way cool! Read more about it in Alfred’s post:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/alfredth/archive/2011/10/07/be-the-robot.aspx

If you missed my presentation in Roanoke, don’t fret…I’ll be presenting it again at the Charlottesville .NET User Group on November 17th. And if you run a local user group in Mid-Atlantic and would like me to bring the presentation to you, just drop me a note.