Wednesday, November 23rd 2011
Kinect For Windows Launches 2012: Aimed At PC Enthusiasts and Businesses
The XBOX 360 Kinect motion tracking device has been a huge hit, especially with the modding community, who have got it to do things that Microsoft never envisaged for it. This appears to have paid off, because in an MSDN blog, Microsoft announced that in 2012, they will launch a version tailor made for a Windows PC. It's very much the same as the 360 version, except for things like firmware adjustments, a shorter USB cable for greater signal reliability and a small dongle to "improve coexistence with other USB peripherals". For developers, the new firmware "enables the depth camera to see objects as close as 50 centimeters in front of the device without losing accuracy or precision, with graceful degradation down to 40 centimeters." Also, the Software Development Kit (SDK) has seen numerous upgrades. There's significant interest from businesses too, so Microsoft "are proud to be helping those companies to explore the profound implications NUI has for the future." Finally, the Kinect Accelerator incubation project run by Microsoft BizSpark will be giving 10 tech-oriented companies $20,000 to explore innovative new ways of using Kinect. Applications close on January 25th, 2012. Official forum: General Discussion-Kinect for Windows SDK
27 Comments on Kinect For Windows Launches 2012: Aimed At PC Enthusiasts and Businesses
social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/kinectsdk/threads
Always wanted to play the dam thing but didn't want to get an unnecessary xbox with their unnecessary online fees.
What do I do in an FPS? I move my eyes around while my head stays put and I try to use the mouse to mimic my eye movements.
We need something like that. Wherever you look, it looks.
Or imagine a clothes company automatically displaying your image with their latest clothes design as you walk past.
or imagine a new housing development where you can pinch and zoom into the design of their new house.
all this without any touch, clicks or buttons presses.
or imagine at all the games in the arcade that can be made by using the kinect technology.
as for me....its just a replacement for my wireless mouse so I can be even better couch potato! :-P
but when you're typing or playing FPS with a keyboard and mouse, I agree you will be only 30cm away from the screen.
www.naturalpoint.com/trackir/
And it kicks ass.
TIR is accessible to anyone who wants it. And lets face it kinect is not all that cheap either. And you can get a TIR4 for $100, you only need TIR5 if you want the latest and greatest.
I wonder how overclocking tools for kinect will look like, people would be fing rain-dancing...
I dont know, sometimes i wonder where all this tech is heading.
Maybe if they combine it with 3d , that could be pretty interesting, so far tho, it hasnt interested me that much, ive had consoles both sony and xbox, but the pc is enough these days.
Im interested to see if we can get some nice applications for this device. Id love to try just using it instead of a mouse for a laugh. Windows 8 with its dodgy tablet UI might be good to use with Kinect. Shouting at my Kinect to pause a movie or something might be interesting.
I can see indy developers having a right crack at using Kinect or maybe Kinect enabled multi platform games for 360 will show up on PC with support. I think Mass Effect 3 has some sort of support for it so the PC version might end up with support.