Digital News Report – Microsoft Corp. has released the Kinect™ for Windows® Software Development Kit (SDK), which is available as a free beta release download. The developer’s kit is to help researchers and computer program hobbyists create new and interesting uses with Microsoft’s Kinect controller.
The Kinect was developed to work as a hands free controller for the Xbox 360 game console. Currently you can only use the Beta Kinect SDK software to develop for non-commercial uses, but there will eventually be a commercial version released at a future date.
Depth sensing, human motion tracking, voice recognitions, and object recognition are some of the hot topics that programmers have been interested with the Kinect, which was released in December 2010. At OpenKinect.org, a community has formed for people that are interested in developing new uses for the Kinect controller.
The Kinect developer’s kit works on Windows 7 operating system. The free software will have drivers that will let you connect a Kinect directly to the PC computer. You do not use Xbox 360 to use the developer’s kit. The computer system minimum requirements is a PC with a dual-core, 2.66-GHz or faster processor with a minimum 2GB system memory (4GB recommended). A graphics display adapter card that supports DirectX® 9.0c capabilities. You will also need to install Visual Studio 2010 Express and Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0.
With the free Kinect developer’s kit, there is access to extra information such as raw data streams, skeletal tracking data, advanced audio features, demo code, and documentation. The raw data collects depth sensor, color camera sensor, along with a microphone array. The skeletal tracking will be able to track either one or two people.
The free software download is located at http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/kinectsdk/download.aspx
By: Victoria Brown