Kinect For Windows SDK Hits Beta 2

The Microsoft Kinect has spawned some very interesting uses that are not at all what most of us first envisioned when the controller landed for the Xbox 360 and gamers. I mentioned a few days ago that Microsoft would be offering a SDK for businesses to make apps that would use Kinect for things in the business world.

The Kinect for Windows SDK has now hit beta 2 and you can download it right now to play with. The SDK still supports the Kinect on machines running Windows 7. It offers APIs for raw sensor streams and human motion tracking. The SDK allows devs using C++, C#, and Visual Basic via Visual Studio 2012 to access the capabilities of the Kinect.

The SDK allows raw sensor streams to be accessed that are generated by the Kinect sensor. The SDK supports skeletal tracking, advanced audio capability, and it comes with sample code and documents. The SDK installer is under 100MB and easy to install. The official website for Kinect for Windows will go live here, the link is not live as of the time of writing.