Kinect for Windows SDK beta.

Com­ing later this spring, the Kinect for Win­dows SDK is a pro­gram­ming toolkit that will enable researchers and enthu­si­asts easy access to the capa­bil­i­ties offered by the Microsoft Kinect device con­nected to com­put­ers run­ning Microsoft Win­dows 7.

With this SDK, you’ll be able to take advan­tage of:

• The lat­est advances in audio pro­cess­ing, which include a four-element micro­phone array with sophis­ti­cated acoustic noise and echo can­cel­la­tion for crys­tal clear audio.
• Sound source local­iza­tion for beam­form­ing, which enables the deter­mi­na­tion of a sound’s spa­tial loca­tion, enhanc­ing reli­a­bil­ity when inte­grated with the Microsoft speech recog­ni­tion API.
• Depth data, which pro­vides the dis­tance of an object from the Kinect cam­era, as well as the raw audio and image data, which together open up oppor­tu­ni­ties for cre­at­ing richer nat­ural user inter­face experiences.
• Highly per­for­mant and robust skele­tal track­ing capa­bil­i­ties for deter­min­ing the body posi­tions of one or two per­sons mov­ing within the Kinect field of view.
• Doc­u­men­ta­tion for the APIs and a descrip­tion of the SDK architecture.
• Sam­ple code that demon­strates how to use the func­tion­al­ity in the SDK.
• This SDK is intended for non-commercial use to enable exper­i­men­ta­tion in the world of nat­ural user inter­face expe­ri­ences, with new state-of-the-art fea­tures planned for future releases that will con­tinue to pro­vide new ways to experiment.

Source — http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/kinectsdk/