The kinect is this very cool peripheral for the xbox 360 that most can’t use in their tiny bedrooms/livingrooms thanks to the US user testing, not that it matters becaue there hasn’t been a great buzz for official usage for it anyway, or not that i’ve heard, whereas the hacker developer scene has made some pretty nifty pc apps already.
Hot on the heals of the kinects release adafruit.com set up a competition to get devs to develop drivers for this microsoft wonder, sure enough it was up and running within days and the hacker community started creating, we’ve seen block representations of people and their cats in minecraft, street fighter moves with the classic hadouken and shoryuken movements and many fun ways to control a pc. But now…
There’s been rumors of an official microsoft sdk for a while now, and there’s also been talk of an unofficial sdk by some German developers. But Microsoft have officially announced that a non commercial use sdk for windows is coming very soon, wether or not they eventually put this into the xna framework too is yet to be seen, but if the simplicity of xna for windows and the kinect sdk can be used easily by lesser skilled coders such as myself, this could mean lots of fun to be had, a very good reason to be ebaying a kinect methinks ^_^.
The reason for sdks and frameworks is for simple api and method calls hiding the complex algorithms, and integration with operating systems. The sdk will compile the code a developer creates and boom, an installer is made for the world to play with your creation, it’s wicked fun stuff.
resources include (and many thanks to):
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-12531127
http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/38701/microsoft-kinect-sdk-officially-confirmed
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10797_3-20034534-235.html
Talk about your hot-ass news stories! Grigorig breaks the SDK story! Hurrah!