Kinect for Windows SDK 1.5 is here

I know I am late to the announcement party but, in case you haven’t heard, Microsoft releated the Kinect for Windows SDK 1.5. This release is the second iteration of the product in only a few months which speaks volumes of the agile approach followed by the Kinect for Windows product team. The SDK contains many cool new features, here are the one I am most excited about:

·         Face Tracking SDK:  This component provides a real-time 3D mesh of facial features—tracking the head position, location of eyebrows, shape of the mouth, etc.

·         Kinect Studio,This tool which allows developers to record and play back Kinect data, dramatically shortening and simplifying the development lifecycle of a Kinect application. Now a developer writing a Kinect for Windows application can record clips of users in the application’s target environment and then replay those clips at a later time for testing and further development.

·         Near Mode Skeletal Tracking: This allows developers to create applications that track skeletal movement at closer proximity, like when the end user is sitting at a desk or needs to stand close to an interactive display.

·         Joint Orientation: Kinect for Windows runtime provides Joint Orientation information for the skeletons tracked by the Skeletal Tracking pipeline.  The Joint Orientation is provided in two forms:  A Hierarchical Rotation based on a bone relationship defined on the Skeletal Tracking joint structure, and an Absolute Orientation in Kinect camera coordinates.

In addition to the aformentioned components, this SDK includes a lot of performance improvements in the depth and color frame stream processing. If you are interested on Kinect for Windows applications, you should definitely go check out this release.

Now I know what  I am going to be doing this weekend.