A day ago, the Kinect for Windows team released the Kinect for Windows SDK 1.0. It enables  easy access to the capabilities offered by the Microsoft Kinect device connected to computers running the Windows 7 and Windows 8 Developer Preview.

Kinect for Windows SDK includes drivers, rich APIs for raw sensor streams and human motion tracking, installation documents, and resource materials. By leveraging Kinect for Windows SDK, developers can build more interactive Windows Apps with C++, C#, or Visual Basic.

Key features:

• Raw sensor streams – Give access of raw data streams from the depth sensor, color camera sensor, and four-element microphone array enables developers to build upon the low-level streams.
• Skeletal tracking – Track the skeleton image of one or two people moving within the Kinect field and help to create gesture-driven applications.
• Advanced audio capabilities – Integration of audio capabilities with the Windows speech recognition API.

The release comes with many improvements to SDK and runtime, including:

• Support for up to four Kinect sensors plugged into the same computer.
• Significantly improved skeletal tracking, including the ability for developers to control which user is being tracked by the sensor.
• Near Mode for the new Kinect for Windows hardware, which enables the depth camera to see objects as close as 40 centimeters in front of the device.
• Many API updates and enhancements in the managed and unmanaged runtimes.
• The latest Microsoft Speech components (V11) are now included as part of the SDK and runtime installer.
• Improved “far-talk” acoustic model that increases speech recognition accuracy.
• New and updated samples, such as Kinect Explorer, which enables developers to explore the full capabilities of the sensor and SDK, including audio beam and sound source angles, color modes, depth modes, skeletal tracking, and motor controls.
• A commercial-ready installer which can be included in an application’s set-up program, making it easy to install the Kinect for Windows runtime and driver components for end-user deployments.
• Robustness improvements including driver stability, runtime fixes, and audio fixes.

System Requirements:

• Windows 7, Windows Embedded Standard 7 or Windows 8 Developer Preview.
• Visual Studio 2010 (including Visual Studio 2010 Express)
• Kinect for Xbox 360 sensor
• GPU supports DirectX 9.0c capabilities

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Kinect for Windows SDK v1.0

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