Windows 10 apps will soon be compatible with the Kinect sensors

Microsoft will soon allow developers to make Windows 10 apps compatible with Xbox’s motion sensor, Kinect. While the majority of people think that Microsoft has already given up on Kinect, these fresh reports show that Redmond still has plans with the motion sensing technology.

As Microsoft’s blog post states, starting from the Anniversary Update for Windows 10, UWP apps will be allowed to access Kinect’s data and use the motion sensor as a control device. According to the same blog post, most of today’s UWP apps can’t access most of the data from a Kinect sensor (or any third-party sensor) including RGB, infrared (IR), depth data and skeleton data, with the last being very important to Kinect apps.

Reportedly, three things will make the integration with Kinect in Windows 10 possible. These three things are:

• “The new Windows.Media.Capture.Frames extensions to Media Capture are available in the Windows 10 SDK preview, build 14332 or newer. These API extensions are device independent. To access IR and depth data, a compatible device and a matching device driver are also required.
• A matching driver update for Kinect will be available later this spring.
• To access skeleton data from Kinect, which is delivered through Windows.Media.Capture as a custom stream, a Kinect-specific supplemental SDK is needed, which we plan to release in the second half of 2016.”

Microsoft additionally promised that none of existing Kinect Win32 apps and SDK capabilities will be affected by the new Kinect support. Check out the brief preview of Kinect SDK for Windows 10:

What do you think about using Kinect in Windows 10? Is it a worthy controller, or is this Microsoft’s try to resurrect something that will fail? Tell us in the comments below.

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