Developers who signed up for the Kinect for Windows v2 Developer Preview will soon be receiving an updated version of the gesture and voice recognition hardware. These are preliminary versions of the device to assist developers interested in writing applications for it. The final version is scheduled to ship next summer.
New features in Kinect for Windows v2 include a wider field of view, time-of-flight technology, lower latency gesture recognition, better skeleton tracking, tracking for more individuals at once and approximate heartbeat tracking.