Kinect For Windows v1.5

Thursday, May 24, 2012

A few days ago a new version of the Microsoft Kinect for Windows SDK has been released!

It contains a number of interesting features:

  • Kinect Studio - a new tool which allows developers to record and playback Kinect data, simplifying the development lifecycle of Kinect applications

  • Face Tracking SDK - real-time 3D mesh of facial features (i.g. head position, eyebrows location, mouth expressions)

  • Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) - best practices for the creation of Natural User Interfaces using Kinect

  • Sample code additions and improvements - new and "Basics" series of samples in C++ and C#

  • SDK documentation improvements - migration to MSDN for easier discoverability and real-time updates

  • New and improved skeletal tracking capabilities - added Seated SkeletalTracking and Near mode support

  • Performance and data quality enhancements

  • Joint Orientation information - to enable avatar animation scenarios (i.g. Kinect Sports-like applications)

  • New supported languages for speech recognition - French, Spanish, Italian and Japanese

You can download the new Runtime and SDK v1.5 from Microsoft Kinect download site.

The Human Interface Guidelines and the new documentation can be found here.