Thursday, June 16th, 2011 Posted by Jim Thacker

Microsoft releases official Kinect SDK

Microsoft has released an official SDK for Kinect, its motion-detecting Xbox 360 peripheral.

The corporation was initially critical of the Kinect modding community, but changed its position earlier this year with the growing popularity of sites like KinectHacks.net and OpenKinect.

Within the 3D community, coders like Jasper Brekelmans and Daniel Shiffman have developed tools for extracting usable motion data from the Kinect, while commercial developer iPi Soft has built Kinect support into its inexpensive Desktop Motion Capture System.

The SDK itself, which is still a beta, includes drivers, APIs for the sensor streams, and a sample game.

It’s too early to say yet what difference an official development kit will make to motion-capture tools: we’ll update when we’ve had a chance to speak to some of the main participants.

Read more about the Kinect SDK

Download the beta version of the Kinect SDK