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):
Just in time for a couple of upcoming presentations I’m doing with hardware comes a very cool announcement. The TL;DR version:
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’ve been working on a fun and cool project for the Mid Atlantic Developer Expo, which opens NEXT WEEK, namely a Kinect-enabled Session Finder.
The project uses the recently-released Kinect SDK for Windows beta, a custom version of the Session Sorter code from the MADExpo website, hosted in a WebBrowser control within a WPF application. The WPF application is useful since I can use it to capture audio from Kinect and enable speech recognition, as well as to run the app in kiosk mode. Meanwhile, in the background, I’m running the Coding4Fun Mouse Cursor sample that I blogged about earlier today, which captures my gestures and turns them into mouse moves and clicks. Continue reading Video: Kinect-enabled MADExpo Session Finder
Last week, I noted the release of the Kinect SDK for Windows beta, and at the end of the post pointed to some cool projects put together by the folks over at Coding4Fun on Channel9. One of the projects I’ve been playing with a bit is the Kinect Mouse Cursor project, which at the time of my post last week was only available in binary form. Continue reading Source Code Available for the Kinect Mouse Cursor Project
In case you missed the big announcement yesterday, the wait is over and those of you itching to try your hand at some NUI goodness on Windows with an official SDK can go grab the bits for the Kinect SDK for Windows beta.
I downloaded the beta SDK yesterday during the all-day Channel 9 Live event showcasing what you can do with the SDK (the recording of the stream is available here…eventually, the recordings will likely live elsewhere on Channel 9). So far, I’ve just run some of the samples that come with the SDK, including a skeletal tracking sample, and a sample game that uses both skeletal tracking and voice recognition. Very cool. Continue reading Kinect SDK for Windows beta Now Available