Kinect functionality available to UWP apps on Windows 10.
Important developments updates with the Kinect DK which now allow functionality available to UWP apps
Another key feature of the new APIs is that they are designed to work with the Kinect sensor but with any other sensors capable of delivering rich data streams.
So to facilitate this the Kinect driver is now on Windows Update. So if you’d like try out this new functionality now, simply go to the Device Manager and update the driver for the Kinect sensor.
In addition to enabling the new UWP APIs described above, the new driver also lets you use the Kinect color camera as a normal webcam. This means that apps which use a webcam, such as Skype, can now employ the Kinect sensor as their source. It also means that you can use the Kinect sensor to enable Windows Hello for authentication via facial recognition.
Another GitHub sample demonstrates how to use new special-correlation APIs, such as CameraIntrinsics or DepthCorrelatedCoordinateMapper, to process RGB and depth camera frames for background removal. These APIs take advantage of the fact that the Kinect sensor’s colour and depth cameras are spatially correlated by calibration and depth frame data.
Finally, we should note that the Xbox summary update also enables these Kinect features through Windows.Media.Capture.Frames for UWP apps. Thus, apps that use the Kinect sensor’s RGB, infrared, and/or depth cameras will run on Xbox with same code, and Xbox can also use the Kinect RGB camera as a normal webcam for Skype-like scenarios
Key links
Alex Turner Channel 9 video resources is now available on GitHub as part of the Windows universal samples. What’s great about this sample is you can use Windows.Media.Capture.Frames APIs to enumerate the Kinect sensor’s RGB/IR/depth cameras and then use MediaFrameReader to stream frames. This API lets you access pixels of each individual frame directly in a highly efficient way.
My colleague Mike Taulty has done a great walkthrough of the new SDK at https://mtaulty.com/2016/11/07/windows-10-1607-uwp-and-experimenting-with-the-kinect-for-windows-v2-update/