For those of you who develop Kinect v2 apps for Windows, you can run them on Windows 10 Technical Preview with a little settings change. Kinect SDK version 2, which has been available for quite some time now, allows developers to publish Kinect apps to the Windows Store. In fact, the SDK fully supports Windows 8.1 Modern apps.
However, for those of you who are early adopters and have Windows 10 Technical Preview installed, you may be experiencing issues with your Kinect apps. Apparently, WinRT apps which require access to a camera need to be explicitly allowed to make use of that hardware, or else it will not work. Fortunately, there is a solution. Here’s what you need to do:
- 1. Launch your app using Visual Studio or Windows Store, or install using PowerShell – If you are a developer, you most probably have Visual Studio installed. If you have received a PowerShell script with an executable file, run it as you’d normally do. If you have downloaded a Kinect app from Windows Store, ignore this step.
- 2. Close the app (shut down the app completely.)
- 3. Launch PC Settings -> Privacy -> Webcam. You’ll find a list of the installed apps that make use of connected cameras. By default, each toggle-button is grayed-out. Select the installed Kinect app and switch to “On”.
Now you can enjoy running, testing, and developing Kinect apps on Windows 10 Technical Preview. Try it out and let us know if it works!
