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.