Feature Stories
Silicon Valley’s Kinect Contributions
Mihai Budiu distinctly remembers the buzz surrounding Kinect for Xbox 360 when it was unveiled in 2009 as Project Natal. The public announcements and demos about the technology immediately captured his imagination.
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Helping Kinect Recognize Faces
To use a Kinect for Xbox 360 gaming device is to see something akin to magic. Different people move in and out of its view, and Kinect recognizes the change in a player and responds accordingly.
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Kinect Audio: Preparedness Pays Off
It always helps to be prepared. Just ask Ivan Tashev. A principal software architect in the Speech group at Microsoft Research Redmond, Tashev played an integral role in developing the audio technology.
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Kinect Body Tracking Reaps Renown
By any standard, Kinect for Xbox 360 has proved to be a technological sensation. Kinect, the controller-free interface that enables users to interact with the Xbox 360 with the wave of your hand or the sound of your voice, sold 8 million units in its first 60 days.
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Videos
Kinect for Windows SDK
The Kinect for Windows SDK beta is a programming toolkit for application developers. It enables the academic and enthusiast communities easy access to the capabilities offered by the Microsoft Kinect device connected to computers running the Windows 7 operating system.
The Kinect for Windows SDK beta includes drivers, rich APIs for raw sensor streams and human motion tracking, installation documents, and resource materials. It provides Kinect capabilities to developers who build applications with C++, C#, or Visual Basic by using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010. Learn more >
Kinect for Windows SDK CodeCamp
In June of 2011, 40 individuals from the academic and developer communities were invited to Microsoft to participate in CodeCamp for Kinect.
With access to the Kinect for Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) beta and each other, participants were encouraged to think beyond gaming. With a new way of computing, potentially revolutionary applications from healthcare, education, manufacturing to teleconferencing may come to exist.
Blogs
Publications
- KinectFusion: Real-time 3D Reconstruction and Interaction Using a Moving Depth Camera, Shahram Izadi, David Kim, Otmar Hilliges, David Molyneaux, Richard Newcombe, Pushmeet Kohli, Jamie Shotton, Steve Hodges, Dustin Freeman, Andrew Davison, and Andrew Fitzgibbon, ACM UIST, October 2011
- Low-Complexity, Near-Lossless Coding of Depth Maps from Kinect-Like Depth Cameras, Sanjeev Mehrotra, Zhengyou Zhang, Qin Cai, Cha Zhang, and Philip A. Chou, in Proceedings of MMSP, IEEE, October 2011
- Real-Time Human Pose Recognition in Parts from a Single Depth Image, Jamie Shotton, Andrew Fitzgibbon, Mat Cook, Toby Sharp, Mark Finocchio, Richard Moore, Alex Kipman, and Andrew Blake, in CVPR, IEEE, June 2011
- Efficient Regression of General-Activity Human Poses from Depth Images, Ross Girshick, Jamie Shotton, Pushmeet Kohli, Antonio Criminisi, and Andrew Fitzgibbon, in ICCV, IEEE, 2011
