As promised, Microsoft has updated its Kinect for Windows SDK with support for Windows 8. In addition, ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foledy reported that the release offered several new features, including the following:
- “Exposure of the infrared stream in the application programming interface (API) as a new color image format
- Extended depth data (beyond four meters), but with reduced quality as distance increases
- Ability to optimize color camera settings
- Support for a new raw Bayer color image format
- Exposure of the sensor’s accelerometer in the API
- Support for German in the speech-recognition pack
- Support for several new APIs for converting data between color, depth and skeleton coordinate spaces
- Support for Windows running in a virtual machine (VM), including those from Microsoft’s Hyper-V team, VMWare, and Parallels”
Microsoft also announced that Kinect for Windows hardware would go on sale in China on the same day.
