Developing applications for Kinect,an amazing technology.

The XBOK Kinect at my house

In November 2010, Microsoft brought in to the market the worlds fastest selling consumer electronic device, Kinect. Kinect was developed to be an add-on peripheral for Microsoft XBOX 360 game console. Kinect is a motion sensing input device, consisting of a range camera,infrared depth sensor technology,multi-array microphone,and a software technology that enables full body 3D motion capture,facial recognition and voice recognition. Kinect has the ability to detect and track up to six people.

About a month ago,on Christmas boxing day sale, I bought Kinect for $99 for an XBOX 360 which is already in the house. There were two full games with the deal, and also, I was able to download free trial games on the external hard drive,I formatted for this purpose. For about a week everybody was excited to play the games which require jumping, dodging,punching, and waving hands in front of  this amazing device.Then the interest slowly faded away. Nobody wants to get tired, We just want to play games and have fun! After trying Kinect for a day or so you might conclude the stuff is for kids, but the kids also lose interest in gaming when it is on Kinect !, Ya! that’s what happened, every body lost interest.So I started to look for other use of this amazing technology. A little bit Googling revealed the following results:

Microsoft released the SDK, very recently and people are still working on their applications. I also plan to develop one application using this technology. I have installed the SDK on my PC. And I have experimented with some of the features. You can get the SDK from here: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/kinectforwindows/download/  . The SDK comes with a full documentation and programming guides, there will be no trouble setting up.

Here are some links that will help you get started, if you are interested.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/kinectforwindows/

http://raychambers.wordpress.com/kinect-applications/

http://kinectcontrib.codeplex.com/

http://geekswithblogs.net/mbcrump/archive/2011/07/04/kinecting-the-dots-adding-buttons-to-your-kinect-application.aspx

Here are my screen shots for the Sample Skeletal Viewer application that comes with the SDK. I have also the screen shot of my visual studio with a project template that will soon be turned in to an app. I will do another post about my progress. Thank You for reading this.

Sample Skeletal Viewer

Visual Studio, template for Kinect Skeletal App with VB