Getting Started with Kinect for Windows SDK

I have been experimenting with Kinect for Windows SDK and here are the steps to get things started.

1. Download and install the Kinect for Windows SDK. Follow the system requirements and installation instructions on the website. The main software requirements are Visual Studio 2010 Express or other Visual Studio 2010 edition and .NET Framework 4.0.

2. To get started with the development, I find the Quickstart Series are very helpful.

3. Some other details about the API:

• In the depth map, each pixel is labeled with a number from 1 to 7 to indicate that it is part of user 1, 2, and so on up to 7. If a pixel is not part of a user then it is assigned index of zero. Each pixel is a short value. We can extract the player index and the depth using the following:

  userIndex = s & DepthImageFrame.PlayerIndexBitmask; // The mask is 0x07.
  depth = ((ushort) s) >> DepthImageFrame.PlayerIndexBitmaskWidth; // The width is 3.
  

• Depth values are in mm.
• There are 20 joints in the skeleton tracking.