Chapter 2. Getting Started

The Kinect for Windows SDK is a toolkit for developing applications for Kinect devices. Developing applications using Kinect SDK is fairly easy and straightforward. The SDK provides an interface to interact with Kinect via system drivers. The SDK includes drivers for the Kinect sensor, which interact with the device, and the OS and APIs interact with the device through program. Overall, the SDK provides an opportunity to the developers to build an application using either managed code (C# and VB.NET) or unmanaged code (C++) using Visual Studio 2010 or higher versions, running on Windows 7 or Windows 8.

Kinect for Windows Developer Toolkit is an additional installer that comes with a set of extended components, such as Face Tracking SDK, which helps to track human faces, and Kinect Studio to record and playback the depth and color stream data. The Developer Toolkit also contains samples and documentation to give you a quick hands-on reference.

While the application development with Kinect SDK is fascinating and straightforward, there are certain things that need to be taken care of during the SDK installation, configuration, and setting up of your development environment. The following is a quick overview of various aspects we'll be discussing in this chapter:

By the end of this chapter, you will have everything set up to start development with the Kinect sensor.