Kinect PC support released, SDK now available

For those PC users who haven't yet had the chance to dance, jostle, and spring in front of their keyboards with a Kinect, today is your lucky day!  Microsoft has released the PC SDK for the kinect.

In all seriousness, however, this is probably where we'll start seeing the really neat stuff that the Kinect can do, although most of that really cool stuff has absolutely nothing to do with playing video games. But, if you're a PC person who loves to tinker, you now have something fairly advanced to tinker on. Have fun! And make me some cool stuff.

The features of the SDK include:

Raw sensor streams
Access to raw data streams from the depth sensor, color camera sensor, and four-element microphone array enables developers to build upon the low-level streams that are generated by the Kinect sensor.

Skeletal tracking
The capability to track the skeleton image of one or two people moving within the Kinect field of view make it easy to create gesture-driven applications.

Advanced audio capabilities
Audio processing capabilities include sophisticated acoustic noise suppression and echo cancellation, beam formation to identify the current sound source, and integration with the Windows speech recognition API.

Sample code and documentation
The SDK includes more than 100 pages of technical documentation. In addition to built-in help files, the documentation includes detailed walkthroughs for most samples provided with the SDK.

Easy installation
The SDK installs quickly, requires no complex configuration, and the complete installer size is less than 100 MB. Developers can get up and running in just a few minutes with a standard standalone Kinect sensor unit (widely available at retail outlets).

You can download the SDK here.