Microsoft’s Kinect is awesome. Not because of the stupid minigames you can play with it on your Xbox360, but because of all the cool stuff hackers have been able to do with it. As entirely predicted, Microsoft has announced today that it will launch an official Kinect SDK for Windows. The device was already purposefully easy to hack, but official support is always a boon.
The announcement was made by Steven Clayton on the official Microsoft blog, and of course references the hacker community that has blossomed around Microsoft’s innovative device, highlighting that it is used for more than mere entertaining but otherwise useless hacks.
“The community that has blossomed since the launch of Kinect for Xbox 360 in November shows the breadth of invention and depth of imagination possible when people have access to ground-breaking technology. Already, researchers, academics and enthusiasts are thinking through what’s next in natural and intuitive technology,” Clayton writes, “For example, in January I mentioned Craig’s talk at the Cleveland Clinic, where he highlighted students at the University of Washington’s Biorobotics Lab using Kinect with a commercially available PHANTOM Omni Haptic Device to explore how robotic surgery could be enhanced by incorporating the sense of feel.”
The Kinect for Windows SDK, as it’s officially called, will be released somewhere in the Spring, and is developed by Microsoft Research in cooperation with Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business. It will be an entirely free download so that hackers and professional researchers alike can get, well, hacking.
“Microsoft’s investments in natural user interfaces are vital to our long-term vision of creating computers that are intuitive to use and able to do far more for us,” said Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, “The fruits of these research investments are manifesting across many of our products, Kinect for Xbox 360 among them.â€
A very clever move by Microsoft, and a breath of fresh air after the likes of Sony and Apple.
“Kinect for Windows SDK”
Riiiiight. Because all the cool stuff people have been doing is only based on windows.
I know they really only have obligations towards Windows but there are open drivers right now that enable the same things for all platforms. It would have been way cooler if they made a software lib that was portable everywhere…
Geez, you trolls always want to see everything in the negative way, I feel sorry for you.
Edited 2011-02-22 00:02 UTC
True it would be lovely if they did that but why would they need to. Windows is good enough for them. Once it is released someone can adapt the current open libraries to have the same interface as the official Windows only one, essentially making it laughably easy to switch between the two.
To be honest I’m happy Microsoft is doing this at all. Brilliant move on there part and make me like them that bit more, even though I use nothing Microsoft based really.
i’d guess there will be much more to the sdk than the api alone
Microsoft isn’t in the business of selling other platforms, they want to sell 360’s, Kinects and Windows. Odds are it’ll plug into XNA Studio, which is .Net, and free, so I think it’s a pretty good deal.
Really? Why would a company develop an SDK for a competing platform?
Next you’ll be asking why Microsoft aren’t making Sony Playstation games, or contributing to the linux kernel … oh wait, they did. There goes my argument….
That’s the problem with MS: they have lots of different divisions developing different products for different markets, yet all of them are conditioned by the single interests of their main cash cow: the Windows OS.
Oh well.
Yeah, what a strange instinct for a company to have: Making money.
It’s not about making money but about the way they maximize their income and how it affects consumers and developers.
And just in case your feelings were hurt I’ll add it’s obviously not just a MS thing, eg. Apple also does it’s fair share of lock-in.
But then again we were talking about Microsoft, weren’t we?
….and in an ideal world Apple’s App Store would stock GPL, Linux’s 3D graphics drivers were well supported and my daily commute would cost half the current rail fare.
However in this universe most people game in Windows (excluding consoles obviously as we’re talking desktop / laptop platforms) and Microsoft own Windows. So Redmond not only have a vested interest in supporting their own platform, it would be counter productive in them even releasing drivers for other OSs.
Besides, it’s not like they hadn’t left the Kinect wide up for people like us to use on non-MS platforms – albeit with community drivers rather than MS-endorsed .NET libraries.
Does this mean software developed with this SDK cannot be commercially distributed? It’s a real shame to see such an interesting device being held back to only be first class on an Xbox.
On the other hand, is the GPL a commercial license? Will Microsoft really release something that promotes open source actively over proprietary systems? Strange world.
This will be released under one of MSR’s research/academic licenses, so yes, the software developed with it can’t be sold. A commercial SDK will come later, however.
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/kinectforwindowss…
If you don’t want to wait, don’t want to worry about how the SDK may be permitted to be used or just want something different, here are some things that are available now.
http://codelaboratories.com/kb/nui
I didn’t download the NUI SDK because it is an exe, so I haven’t checked to see what license they are using.
http://www.primesense.com/?p=515
PrimeSense links to http://www.openni.org/ for SDK downloads. The source tree at github has GPL and LGPL licenses.
I am not a programmer, so it is unlikely that I will be able to answer normal (or any) inquiries about these tools. But here they are in case you are interested.
hopefully libfreenect can keep the pace and before you know it you’ll be able to control your media server from your couch.
Most people already can. Remote controls were invented sometime in the 50s
Haha yes but i’m too lazy to buy one.
I use a wirelss mouse and keyboard.
“A very clever move by Microsoft, and a breath of fresh air after the likes of Sony and Apple.”
You’ll be happy to know Sony is also releasing the SDK for Playstation Move. More details to come at GDC.
Got a link so I can add it to the article?
No official announcement yet, but:
http://tinyurl.com/49tdx49
So, seems likely, but still rumor at this point.
We might be happy now, but not in 3 years when Sony takes it back, or cripples it in some way.
The main difference being that you need to be a PS3 accepted developer to be able to even access it.
You may say what you want, but Microsoft is one of the most developer friendly companies out there, regardless of their business practices.
This is true. They know that they need 3rd party developers, because they can’t develop everything themselves & most of the innovation actually comes from outside of MS. How else would their platforms gain traction? This is also how they decide who to acquire & who to push out of business. So, yes, they’re one of the most developer friendly companies around, but remember the old saying: Enemies stab you in the back, friends stab you in the front.