Microsoft’s Kinect has put robotics in the hands of the common man. The hardware is changing the robotics industry as new innovative applications for the product keep popping up.
By creating a method by which a robot can see the software giant has solved a huge problem for inventors and now this aspect can be used in a multitude of different ways. Most other solutions to robotic sight were very bulky or needed separate energy sources making them unwieldy.
Now with Microsoft Kinect these would be inventors have a great base with a cheap and lightweight camera which can capture 3D pictures in real time. So with a little technical knowhow now everyone can build a robot with vision.
What’s more Microsoft is happy to promote you as they have come up with the commercial development kit for people who want to build Windows applications for the peripheral. Their acceptance of the wide range utility of the Kinect is the best news academic and hobby groups can get. The kits are priced at $ 500 and will be available later this month.
Head over to Microsoft’s SDK beta programming toolkit for more information
SDK includes the following features:
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Raw sensor streams
Access to raw data streams from the depth sensor, color camera sensor, and four-element microphone array enables developers to build upon the low-level streams that are generated by the Kinect sensor.
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Skeletal tracking
The capability to track the skeleton image of one or two people moving within the Kinect field of view make it easy to create gesture-driven applications.
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Advanced audio capabilities
Audio processing capabilities include sophisticated acoustic noise suppression and echo cancellation, beam formation to identify the current sound source, and integration with the Windows speech recognition API.
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Sample code and documentation
The SDK includes more than 100 pages of technical documentation. In addition to built-in help files, the documentation includes detailed walkthroughs for most samples provided with the SDK.
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Easy installation
The SDK installs quickly, requires no complex configuration, and the complete installer size is less than 100 MB. Developers can get up and running in just a few minutes with a standard standalone Kinect sensor unit (widely available at retail outlets).