Wow…that didn’t take long. Looks like the folks responsible for making Kinect for Windows an awesome tool for developers looking to add NUI features to their applications are eager to move the platform forward at a rapid pace, as they’ve just announced the availability of the Kinect for Windows SDK 1.5, less than 4 months after the 1.0 release!
Highlights of the new SDK and Runtime (from the above announcement):
The updated SDK also includes support for seated skeletal tracking, and Near Mode, which allows users to use Kinect from a closer position, including skeletal tracking.
- Kinect Studio, our new tool which allows developers to record and play back Kinect data, dramatically shortening and simplifying the development lifecycle of a Kinect application. Now a developer writing a Kinect for Windows application can record clips of users in the application’s target environment and then replay those clips at a later time for testing and further development.
- A set of Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) to guide developers on best practices for the creation of Natural User Interfaces using Kinect.
- The Face Tracking SDK, which provides a real-time 3D mesh of facial features—tracking the head position, location of eyebrows, shape of the mouth, etc.
Significant sample code additions and improvements. There are many new samples in both C++ and C#, plus a “Basics” series of samples with language coverage in C++, C#, and Visual Basic.
- SDK documentation improvements, including new resources as well as migration of documentation to MSDN for easier discoverability and real-time updates.
That’s definitely not all, but head on over to the announcement post to read the rest, or if you can’t wait, go grab the new bits. And while the bits are downloading, enjoy this overview video from Rob Relyea: