Well folkes, here’s the skinny, over at the Microsoft Research Kinect for Windows blog, there’s news that next year will see a new kinect that will have “optimized certain hardware components and made firmware adjustments which better enable PC-centric scenarios”. So if you purchased a Kinect for use with the Kinect for Windows SDK, but don’t have time to do anything with it between your job, your blog, your skyrim/zelda/batman/driver/amnesia/my Japanese coach, then by the time you do get some time, a new Kinect will be out that hopefully has better support for actually detecting you closer up or behind a desk, they haven’t said anything about the desk thing, but they have mentioned with new firmware the depth camera can see objects as close as 50cm, and that “Near mode” will allow “close up” applications, and then it goes into “beyond the living room scenarios for Kinect for Xbox 360” in the same sentence as the close up stuff. Now i failed english many a time, even just then i spelt english wrong, twice!, but my point is that the blog post wasn’t fully clear or detailed, except the part about a shorter cable and something about a dongle, but it didn’t say if it would be able to do away with the power supply.
All this was kinda tied into mentioning when the commercial SDK comes out early next year, so weather we can see the new kinect this early remains to be seen, again, things were implied by sentence structure and not specifically said, though it would make sense that the commercial SDK that will benefit from the new Kinect, will have the new hardware to available at the same time.