MVP Award

I was excited this morning to receive an email notifying me that I had been re-awarded as a Kinect for Windows Microsoft MVP.

I love the fact that Microsoft appreciates the work that people like myself do to help others use and understand the technology.

I am looking forward to many more years of relationship building with Microsoft and developers around the world.

Second Gen Kinect for Windows

Fellow Kinect for Windows MVP,  Tom Kerkhove, has written up a really great blog post on the second generation Kinect for Windows device.
While a few of us have had access to this device and the development kit for a few months now, it is still a preproduction solution so things might change.
It is clearly a big step forward for the device and the capabilities of the new device will bring the reality of vision based technology into more peoples lives.

Face Tracking with Kinect for Windows

The Kinect for Windows development team in Redmond have just posted an excellent article on Face Tracking, along with a bunch of code samples for managed code developers.

MSDN has had an article on Face Tracking for a while now. The code is all native C++, which possibly makes it appear a bit harder than many developers would like.

Providing another managed code introduction can only be a good thing to help .NET developers get started with building a face tracking application with Kinect for Windows.

Just to be clear this is about face tracking and not face recognition.
Face tracking will enable an application to identify the direction a head is facing and match some facial expressions, such as happy (turned up mouth) or sad (lips turned downwards).

Read the article here
Mysteries of Kinect for Windows Face Tracking output explained

Kinect for Windows expands its developer preview program

The new Kinect for Windows 2 device that I received as part of the alpha kit last month is a big step forward form the previous Kinect for Windows device. The resolution is far better and the opportunity for multiple user applications seems to be better. My favourite feature is the possibly the lest expected, the fact that the device has a standard thread for mounting on a tripod.

Kinect for Windows 2 device

The Kinect team is now expanding the availability of these device in the new year and accepting submissions from developers interested in trialling the new device.
The announcement is on the Kinect for Windows team blog here

If you are interested you will need to get your submission in before the end of January 2014.