The latest craze among video gamers is Kinect where they navigate the rapids in a virtual world or to dance along with their amazing music. Perhaps soon to dance Salsa with their clocked dance partner. Today, Microsoft has made Xbox Kinect is a very serious business tool, vital to the future of Microsoft. Microsoft announced and confirmed today Kinect for Windows SDK this spring.

Until now there has only been some Kinect hacks dreamed up and implemented by hardworking enthusiasts around the world as we reported last year. So it was rumoured early this year, and now it's been confirmed. This will be available this spring as a free download, and will give academic researchers and enthusiasts’ access to key pieces of the Kinect system-such as the audio technology, system application programming interfaces and direct control of the Kinect sensor itself." Commercial licensing details will be made available at some point thereafter. This could kick-start great possibilities.

Optical Camouflage Demo with Kinect: artandmobile.com

Kinect hack creates world's greatest shadow puppet

The magic that makes Kinect work is currently locked away inside the XBox. So it is going to take a lot of efforts to tap into the technology. This SDK will give hobbyists better access to the motion-sensing and voice recognition technology inside Kinect and also to the software that allows them to properly interpret those signals. Great possibilities will emerge for Robotics, Motion Detection and more that no one company can properly tap into. I am so glad that Microsoft is releasing this as a free SKD.

Ubelly reported in the words of Craig Mundie (Microsoft Chief Research and Strategy Officer) who made the announcement, ‘we think we’re going to see a huge explosion in interest’ and I couldn’t agree more. The huge investment that Microsoft has already made in Natural User Interfaces, coupled with the creativity and passion of the academic and research communities is surely going to produce some wonderful experiences with this technology.

Imidiate applications are such as sporting applications such as the analysis of your golf swing or cricketing (bowling and batting) and the world of sports physiotherapy. In those situations, Kinect could provide detailed analysis and potentially do away with Golf Pro?

Or medical applications, where Kinect could provide surgeons control over instruments they’re not allowed to touch in sterile environments or allowing doctors a simpler.

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These are various short and long News Articles, Reviews and Blogs by Salar Golestanian and employees of SalarO.com as well as contributors of Scifiwood.com. The subject matter are mixed topics with Pure Science to Science Fiction as well as general topics on Web Trends, Technology, Software Engineering genre, or whatever subject that can affect the convergence of today's technology with Science Fiction in any shape or form. These Blogs and Reviews don't have commercial or corporate aspiration, so they are indeed completely independent views. Some of these entries may be short and just link you to the actual news or site that can expand further on the subject of interest. In Phase II we plan to incorporate some Social Networking applications within the portal.