Today marks a very important day; when Kinect became available for Windows. Dates and rumours have been flying around for over a year now, the first Beta version has been available since June of last year. Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer, promised the world back at the CES conference that Microsoft would be shipping their first Kinect for Windows on this very day, and I’m glad that there hasn’t been any withdrawals, postponements, or the likes.

So what’s included in the box? The contents include the Kinect sensor, along with the official version 1.0 of the SDK. Currently the Kinect for Windows is only available for purchase at the Microsoft Store and Amazon for $2499.99, roughly R2000, or $150 for qualified educational customers. Microsoft has announced on their website that a number of improvements have been made since the previous Beta 2. These include the following:

• Support for up to four Kinect sensors plugged into the same computer
• Significantly improved skeletal tracking, including the ability for developers to control which user is being tracked by the sensor
• Near Mode for the new Kinect for Windows hardware, which enables the depth camera to see objects as close as 40 centimeters in front of the device
• Many API updates and enhancements in the managed and unmanaged runtimes
• The latest Microsoft Speech components (V11) are now included as part of the SDK and runtime installer
• Improved “far-talk” acoustic model that increases speech recognition accuracy
• New and updated samples, such as Kinect Explorer, which enables developers to explore the full capabilities of the sensor and SDK, including audio beam and sound source angles, colour modes, depth modes, skeletal tracking, and motor controls
• A commercial-ready installer which can be included in an application’s set-up program, making it easy to install the Kinect for Windows runtime and driver components for end-user deployments.
• Robustness improvements including driver stability, runtime fixes, and audio fixes

You may find the full specifications on the SDK here. There has been no word as yet on any compatible games to be released on PC for Windows, but I’m sure the wait won’t be too long. It shouldn’t be too long either before developers/programmers develop the first applications for us to test the hardware on.