Are you heard about Kinect ? This is one of the technology from Microsoft . Today i want to share some ideas about Microsoft Kinect and it’s app development with SDK . Through this Kinect series post , you can get a overall idea about Microsoft Kinect, how to write a kinect application and it’s development . Before going to the coding section , I want to explain the basics of a Kinect device and Xbox’s .
Why Kinect technology ?
Mostly Kinect is used for Video game consoles but after the release of Microsoft Kinect SDK , It has been vital part of many medical equipment like 3d Scanning , X-Ray . The majority of these equipment’s working on the basic of gesture detection technique .
Another useful advantages of Kinect device is voice recognition . Using this voice recognition, we can control the Xbox 360 console . In coming sections i am going to explain about the kinect SDK , different Xbox’s and finally developing a simple app with kinect SDK kit . Lets look one by one .
Microsoft Kinect SDK
Here , I am telling about the Kinect SDK and kinect devices . Microsoft released their Kinect Software Development kit ( SDK ) for Windows 7 on 2011 . This SDK allows you to write kinect programming code in C# , C++ and Visual Basic .NET . Each versions of SDK is dependent on each Kinect device . This is very important . So Microsoft is released their SDK versions starting from version 1.5 . If you have latest Xbox one device , then you should have Kinect SDK version 2.0 in your PC .
Kinect SDK versions
- Version 1.5 , 1.6 , 1.7 , 1.8 .
- Version 2.0 – This is the latest Kinect SDK released by Microsoft .
Next lets go on the different Xbox consoles . The two major xbox are Xbox 360 and Xbox One .
Xbox 360
Xbox 360 is a game console by Microsoft launched in 2005 . Usually you can see Xbox’s in shopping malls or children’s park . The device is working by detecting your gesture only i.e ) Simply stand in font of any xbox device and show a gesture using your hand , the device will capture your gesture and process that . This is the basic working principle behind of any Xbox devices .
Xbox One
This is the latest Xbox device released by Microsoft in 2013 . There are some difference between Xbox one and Xbox 360 . The important differences are :
- Xbox one has advanced features with fast processing speed and controllers than other Xbox .
- Xbox 360 is the 7th generation console while Xbox one is 8th generation console .
- The other important feature is motion sensing . The Kinect is used for motion sensing in Xbox 360 While Xbox one is using Kinect with Full HD ( better graphics )
How to start writing a kinect application ?
You can simply write an application with the help of SDK but you should test whether the application is working or not with the help of Xbox device . Generally these are the basic requirements to start writing a simple Kinect application.
- Device – Kinect Xbox 360 / Xbox one .
- Software Development Kit ( SDK ) – If you are using latest Xbox one , you should use SDK 2.0. If not , use SDK 1.8 and below versions .
- IDE – Visual studio 2013 and above .
- Operating System – Windows PC with windows 8.1 and higher ( for SDK 2.0 )
Conclusion
From this post , I hope you got some information about what is Microsoft kinect technology and it’s features . If you want to know more information about kinect technology , you can refer the official Microsoft xbox page .
In coming posts , I will share about more about kinect and sample programmes with help of it’s SDK .
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