Microsoft has released Kinect for Windows SDK 1.5 and has now made the Kinect hardware available for 15 new countries including Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan. On top of that, Microsoft has added new capabilities to help developers.
The Kinect for Windows hardware will also be available in 15 additional countries such as Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, Finland, India, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates. This will bring the Kinect for Windows availability to 31 total countries around the world. With this new 1.5 update, developers can now expect to see performance and data quality enhancements and avatar animation scenarios, which allows developers to build applications that control a 3D avatar, just like in the game Kinect Sports.
Kinect for Windows 1.5 will also feature Kinect Studio, which is an application that allows Kinect developers to record, playback, and debut clips of users engaging with their Kinect apps. “Also coming is what we call “seated” or “10-joint” skeletal tracking, which provides the capability to track the head, neck and arms of either a seated or standing user. What is extra exciting to me about this functionality is that it will work in both default and near mode!” Microsoft stated in an official blog post.
There will also be support for new languages for speech recognition, such as French, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese.
