New features for Kinect for Windows

On January 9th, Steve Ballmer announced at CES that we would be shipping Kinect for Windows on February 1st. I am very pleased to report that today version 1.0 of our SDK and runtime were made available for download, and distribution partners in our twelve launch countries are starting to ship Kinect for Windows hardware, enabling companies to start to deploy their solutions. The suggested retail price is $249, and later this year, we will offer special academic pricing of $149 for Qualified Educational Users.

In the three months since we released Beta 2, we have made many improvements to our 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

Among the new features is support for up to four peripherals on the same computer, improved skeletal tracking and the new Near Mode which allows the sensor to track objects as close as 40cm from the device.

You have read this article older with the title New features for Kinect for Windows. You can bookmark this page URL https://angryblackmf.blogspot.com/2012/02/new-features-for-kinect-for-windows.html. Thanks!