Free ly thinking: WPF and Kinect and NUI, but not NUD

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My favorite new guy on the team, Jerry Nixon, (click on his name to see his blog), my favorite because he is the only new guy.  But considering my own seniority at Microsoft, most everyone is a new person.  And I sent him an email yesterday, similar to the following:

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Jerry,

https://bit.ly/crenshawkinectdigestive

Most of the kinect examples use WPF, not XNA.  Pretty cool way to show off the Natural User Interfaces to a school, like for the talk in Nov.

Sam

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Then Jerry writes back:

Sam,

Hey Sam, what am I supposed to do with this?

Sorry to ask, I'm not putting this in context.

//Jerry

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And there lies the issue, when does NUI become real, what is NUI?  And why NUI?  What is WPF’s relation to NUI?  Can there be to many TLAs in any computer oriented communications? (TLA="three letter acronyms", which is a joke if you are translating this post, which I hope you are! Sadly, the joke only appears to work in Spanish and French.  Sorry. Smile )

Voice Input is an example of NUI, and even though with the all too early death of Steve Jobs and the many claims of what Apple did during his tenure, voice input was originally worked on very early in the history of the digital world.  Another NUI would be gestures while touching a screen or object.  Kinect has brought the ability to read actual motion down in prize to a point where many people can afford it.  Other NUIs are things like the brain wave readers that some games use, and sleep clinics use as well to determine sleep apnea (which I suffer from), but the cheap brain wave units are not very good yet.

So with the Kinect, a system that provides both voice and accurate motion input, what it the basis of programming?  Is it command line?  Is it XNA based (that is mostly coding)?  Silverlight?  Can it be used on the phone?  Windows Presentation Foundation or WPF?

The answer my friend is this: All of these can be used, and you might be saying: PHONE?  WTF? (Or if you are polite: WTH?)

But many of the apps for the PC use WPF as the basis for the Kinect, which means that XAML is used for the user interface. 

I don’t have an example of how to do the WPF, but here are some links, and I am working up an example for Kinect so I talk to some of the Imagine Cup teams through my example, and don’t touch or review their code.