Hello folks,

     Recently I got involved in a project for building a demo application for one of our customers with Kinect for Windows. Yes, something similar what Tom Cruise did in the movie Minority Report. Waving arms, moving stuff around, swipes, speech recognition, manipulating computer screens without even touching it. Pretty cool!!! The idea in the movie showed us how technology would be after 50 years from that day.

Minority Report Movie clip.

     Well, that 50 years of time frame got squeezed and recently on Feb 1st 2012, Microsoft released the official Kinect for Windows SDK. That’s just 10 years from the movie release. Although, the product is in it early stages but with developer creativity and continuously improving hardware, those features shown in the movie are not very far away from becoming a reality. Soon after releasing the SDK, Microsoft again announced in March the release of its new Kinect for Windows SDK version 1.5 which is coming out in sometime May. More history about Kinect.

Anyways, so for a newbie with Kinect, where would you start. Here is what I would suggest you can do.

• Watch the Kinect for Windows Quick start Series by Den Fernandez.
• Download the Kinect for Windows SDK and start playing around with the demos in it. It also comes with some basic Kinect documentation.
• Coding4Fun Kinect Projects | Lot many more videos and open sources projects information.
• Kinect for Windows Session at Techdays NL demo by Jesus Rodriguez.
• Book: Beginning Kinect Programming with the Microsoft Kinect SDK.  | I did go through few of the chapters in this book and based on that, it does talk deeply about core Kinect concepts but in very easy to understand way. I would definitely suggest this book for any Kinect developers. I liked the way it explained the Gestures recognition in Chapter 6.
• Buy your Kinect device from either Amazon or NewEgg. You will get it cheaper then buying it from Microsoft Store. Personally, I love Newegg.com as I never had any order related or shipping issues with them.

I always hate developing UI application but well, you would need to get your hands dirty with WPF too in order to work with Kinect. So get started with WPF concepts too.

I will keep adding stuff to the list once I come across them but so far the above list would definitely get you started building your first Kinect apps.

Till then Happy Kinecting…!!!!!

Thanks,

Vishal Mody