Kinect For Windows Resources

Despite having been out for nearly two months, the world has yet to see a decent guide to the Kinect for Windows. While the Xbox and Windows  versions of the Kinect use basically the same hardware, there are subtle but important differences. Thanks to [Matthew Leone] and his awesome summary of developer resources, getting your Kinect project up and running is now a lot easier.

After getting the SDK from the Microsoft Kinect for Windows site, you might want to check out the Microsoft Programming Guide. The Windows Kinect can only be used with Visual Studio, but with that inflexibility comes a few added features. Both versions of the Kinect have a microphone array that allows for determining the direction of a sound source. The Open Source driver has very little support for audio input, but the official Microsoft version has all the APIs for audio capture, source localization, and speech recognition ready to go.

At $250, the Kinect for Windows is a fairly hefty investment. A used Xbox Kinect can be had for around $80, so we’re pretty certain the hacker community is going to steer itself away from the Windows version. Still, if you’re ever paid to develop something for the Kinect you might want the friendly APIs and features not found in the XBox version.

10 thoughts on “Kinect For Windows Resources

    1. I had no problem doing just this. My regular 360 Kinect is recognized first try.

      I’m not going to go spend another $250 over what I already spent just to have a slightly different focus on the kinect cameras.

    2. Yes and no. Yes, you can develop using the 360 kinect, however, you cannot deploy with the 360, you’ll need the development SDK installed for the libraries to detect the 360 variant.

      250$ is for the hardware, and for investment in the SDK. You can use the 360 version with OpenSource libraries just fine everywhere.

      (found this info in one of the links)

Leave a Reply

Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. (Comment Policy)

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.