Microsoft has put the word out that its much awaited Kinect for Windows is now available for purchase in a total of twelve counties worldwide. Priced at $249, this device will later be dished out at a discounted rate of $149 to Qualified Educational Users. Along with the hardware, version 1.0 of its SDK and runtime has also been outed by the company.
The official Kinect for Windows blog has revealed that several improvements have been introduced to the SDK of this device, two different betas of which were released in June and September, last year. These were made available to download for free by Microsoft. While the first beta allowed users to take advantage of the device’s body tracking and voice recognition features, the second one provided them with the ability to plug or unplug the hardware without losing data.
“As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, without many years of intense R&D efforts, including research investments of hundreds of millions of dollars, and deep partnership between our research teams, software teams, hardware teams, manufacturing teams, and games studios, Kinect simply wouldn’t exist. Shipping Kinect for Windows was another cross-Microsoft effort: not only did the hardware and software teams work closely together to create an integrated solution, but our support, manufacturing, supply chain, reverse logistics, and account teams have all been working hard to prepare for today’s launch,†commented Craig Eisler, General Manager, Kinect for Windows, on the blog.
The newly released SDK now provides support for up to four Kinect sensors to be plugged into the same computer. Moreover, the skeletal tracking of this peripheral has also been improved for better recognition of movements. Its Near Mode allows the depth camera to recognize objects that are as close as 40cm in front of the device. Apart from these, the other new features that make their way into the SDK include API updates, the latest Microsoft Speech components, an improved ‘far-talk’ acoustic mode and more.
The SDK of Kinect for Windows will be made available for download, whereas its hardware is now out in twelve select countries at a price of $249 (approx. Rs. 12,240).
