What's In The SDK

By using the Kinect SDK, industrious developers can tap into the Kinect's rich feature set to expand a PC's capabilities.

The Kinect device incorporates high quality microphone and video camera. You could pair both with voice recognition software to enhance the interactivity of an application. The idea here is to innovate and come up with new ways of doing common tasks or, better yet, build a custom solution that leverages Kinect’s capabilities.

With that in mind, Microsoft has positioned the Kinect for Windows SDK beta as a programming toolkit for application developers, allowing academic and enthusiast communities to access the capabilities offered by the Microsoft Kinect device connected to computers running the Windows 7 operating system.

The Kinect for Windows SDK beta includes drivers, rich APIs for raw sensor streams and human motion tracking, installation documents and resource materials. However, the SDK is focused on Microsoft sourced application development tools, basically working only with C++, C#, or Visual Basic by using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.

This SDK includes the following features:

·         Raw sensor streams: Access to raw data streams from the depth sensor, color camera sensor and four-element microphone array enables developers to build upon the low-level streams that are generated by the Kinect sensor.

·         Skeletal tracking: The capability to track the skeleton image of one or two people moving within the Kinect field of view makes it easy to create gesture-driven applications.

·         Advanced audio capabilities: Audio processing capabilities include sophisticated acoustic noise suppression and echo cancellation, beam formation to identify the current sound source and integration with the Windows speech recognition API.

·         Sample code and documentation: The SDK includes more than 100 pages of technical documentation. In addition to built-in help files, the documentation includes detailed walkthroughs for most samples provided with the SDK.

·         Easy installation: The SDK installs quickly, requires no complex configuration, and the complete installer size is less than 100 MB. Developers can get up and running in just a few minutes with a standard standalone Kinect sensor unit (widely available at retail outlets).

Microsoft has yet to disclose an official release date for the commercial version of the SDK, however the company has stated it will be available in the near future.