After months in the making, Beginning Kinect Programming with the Microsoft Kinect SDK, published by Apress and written by Emerging Experiences team members Jarrett Webb and James Ashley, is now in print. The book provides an introductory guide to building Kinect applications using Microsoft’s Kinect for Windows SDK v1.0. It has been on the hot technical releases list on Amazon based on pre-orders alone for the past several weeks.  It then managed to sell out on its first day of availability on Amazon. The inventory, we have been told, will be restocked by this Monday, March 5th, 2012.

Click Here to Purchase/Reserve Your Copy!

Emerging Experiences has been approached before about writing books, but Kinect was the first topic we felt excited enough about to actually want to carry through with such an endeavor. We have never seen the Kinect sensor as merely a gaming device. Instead, we view it as a radical evolution in human-computer interfaces. In the same way that adding touch capabilities to a phone makes it “smart”, putting Kinects in the world is the first step in making our environments “smart”. Rather than a mere novelty, we view the Kinect as a doorway to the future. Beginning Kinect Programming with the Microsoft Kinect SDK is intended to show developers how to walk through that door.

The authors began work on Beginning Kinect Programming with several goals in mind. The primary objective was to share our knowledge of the Kinect as well as many of the techniques we have learned to build Kinect experiences. In this regard, it is of the rare books on Kinect that addresses developers rather than artists and designers. While the book is an introductory book on the Kinect, it is written for experienced developers. The code examples are in C# and leverages WPF because it is the most powerful and rich UI platform. This book provides enough information for other developers to build the sorts of Kinect experiences we build everyday on the Emerging Experiences team. We wanted to share our secrets so others can help us push the Kinect technology to its limits. After months of writing and constant rewriting to keep up with the constantly changing Kinect for Windows SDK, we feel we have met these goals. It is, if nothing else, the sort of book we wish we had when we started our first primitive experiments with the Kinect over a year ago.

Features of the book include:

• Quickly start building applications within the first 15 pages
• Complete coverage of the Kinect for Windows SDK v1.0 API
• A complete history of the Kinect
• Teaches how to manipulate Kinect images using common image processing techniques and tools
• Demonstrates unique ways to use depth data
• Teaches how to take snapshots of users
• Illustrates how to turn a user’s hands into cursors
• Details a framework for capturing poses
• Provides an introduction to gesture detection techniques, including code demonstrations of the Wave, Swipe, Button Push and more
• Presents an extensive set of fully functional games and applications as well as useful tools