Since the Kinect for Windows sensor and SDK arrived, the team has been adding more features and countries in which the product is available at a fair old clip. Today they released version 1.5 of the Kinect for Windows runtime and SDK.

Kinect for Windows hardware is now available in Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan and beginning next month it will arrive in 15 additional countries: Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, Finland, India, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates.

 

The 1.5 SDK also brings a number of new capabilities, all of which are detailed on the Kinect for Windows blog. Some highlights include

  • Kinect Studio. A new tool which allows developers to record and play back Kinect data, dramatically shortening and simplifying the development lifecycle of a Kinect application. Now a developer writing a Kinect for Windows application can record clips of users in the application’s target environment and then replay those clips at a later time for testing and further development.
  • Face Tracking SDK. Which provides a real-time 3D mesh of facial features—tracking the head position, location of eyebrows, shape of the mouth, etc.
  • Seated Skeletal Tracking is now available.
  • New capabilities to enable avatar animation scenarios.
  • Four new languages for speech recognition – French, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese.

 

Having seen what the Kinect Accelerator teams are building with Kinect for Windows, I’m now even more excited to see what the new groups of developers who have access are going to build. I’ll have a few big name customers to talk about next week and show you what they’re doing with it!