Microsoft’s Kinect is now available for purchase for Windows which cost $249, Steve Ballmer did announce the Kinect for windows on January 9 that would become more compatible for PC gaming, The company has delivered on its promise.”I am very pleased to report that today version 1.0 of our SDK and runtime were made available for download, and distribution partners in our twelve launch countries are starting to ship Kinect for Windows hardware, enabling companies to start to deploy their solutions” Windows Team Said.
The Microsoft also said that the Kinect will ship for $249 and with a special discounted academic price of $149 for “Qualified Educational Users” which will arrive by this year.
Kinect For Windows is offering several improvements on SDK and runtime, including:
- Support for up to four Kinect sensors plugged into the same computer
- Significantly improved skeletal tracking, including the ability for developers to control which user is being tracked by the sensor
- Near Mode for the new Kinect for Windows hardware, which enables the depth camera to see objects as close as 40 centimeters in front of the device
- Many API updates and enhancements in the managed and unmanaged runtimes
- The latest Microsoft Speech components (V11) are now included as part of the SDK and runtime installer
- Improved “far-talk” acoustic model that increases speech recognition accuracy
- New and updated samples, such as Kinect Explorer, which enables developers to explore the full capabilities of the sensor and SDK, including audio beam and sound source angles, color modes, depth modes, skeletal tracking, and motor controls
- A commercial-ready installer which can be included in an application’s set-up program, making it easy to install the Kinect for Windows runtime and driver components for end-user deployments.
- Robustness improvements including driver stability, runtime fixes, and audio fixes
According to the Kinect Blog, The SDK version will be updated every 2-3 times per year that let users get a better performance to improve on their applications. Now the Kinect is available for purchase that would cost $249 as we will keep you posted once we get the latest update from Kinect Blog and Microsoft.
Source: Kinect Blog, Microsoft
