New Kinect SDK now out

The new SDK for the Kinect sensor is now available for free download. This brings with it a whole ton of upgrades for those who want to make their computers more aware of their surroundings. There are new sensor modes and all kinds of good stuff. There is also a sizeable gallery of sample programs which you can just play with. This makes it worth a look even if you don’t intend to write any programs for the sensor, but just want to get a feel for the kinds of wonderful things it can do.

The highlight, which I’m really looking forward to playing with, is “Kinect Fusion”. This lets you use the sensor as  kind of hand held 3D scanner. You wave the Kinect around a scene and the program will build up a 3D model of what is in front of it. You’ll need a fairly beefy graphics card in your PC to make it work quickly (it uses the power of the GPU to crunch the scene data), but the results look really impressive. I’m really looking forward to printing little plastic models of me that I can give as Christmas presents…

You can download the SDK from here.