The Consumer Preview available for download.

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At last I had the time to continue with my work on creating device drivers for the various parts of Kinect, the motor driver is up and running. I got a hell of a lot of info from the Open Kinect Wiki site and hopefully the camera and audio drivers will be operating soon. After that I plan on creating an NUI API equivalent for WEC7. One thing this project has helped me is cleaning up the act of the device driver wizard portion of creating USB device drivers.

In December of last year I heard that Microsoft was providing a Kinect sensor for use in the FIRST Robotics Competition’s “Kit of Parts”. For those of you who are not familiar with this competition, it is an annual event for high school students to build a robot capable of solving a problem which varies from year to year. Back in 2008, I volunteered as a judge in a FIRST Tech Challenge and I never forgot the experience of seeing so many young people so excited about an engineering and scientific event. As an inveterate software engineer and amateur robot researcher who uses many different Microsoft technologies, I decided to investigate the Kinect sensor and the SDK Microsoft provided to exploit its capabilities. My thought was that I might learn something myself, while creating an example of how to use the SDK for the basic function of determining the angle between body segments of the person being tracked by the Kinect sensor. Since the Kinect sensor is designed to perform “skeletal tracking,” this is well ...

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