Kinect SDK is a powerful kit designed for application developers and includes APIs, sample code, and drivers.
Kinect SDK enables the academic and enthusiast communities easy access to the capabilities offered by the Microsoft Kinect device connected to computers running the Windows 7 operating system.
Kinect SDK includes drivers, rich APIs for raw sensor streams and human motion tracking, installation documents, and resource materials. It provides Kinect capabilities to developers who build applications with C++, C#, or Visual Basic by using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.
Note: This SDK is designed for non-commercial purposes only.

Raw sensor streams:
· Access to raw data streams from the depth sensor, color camera sensor, and four-element microphone array enables developers to build upon the low-level streams that are generated by the Kinect sensor.
Skeletal tracking:
· The capability to track the skeleton image of one or two people moving within the Kinect field of view make it easy to create gesture-driven applications.
Advanced audio capabilities:
· Audio processing capabilities include sophisticated acoustic noise suppression and echo cancellation, beam formation to identify the current sound source, and integration with the Windows speech recognition API.
Sample code and documentation:
· The SDK includes more than 100 pages of technical documentation. In addition to built-in help files, the documentation includes detailed walkthroughs for most samples provided with the SDK.
Easy installation:
· The SDK installs quickly, requires no complex configuration, and the complete installer size is less than 100 MB. Developers can get up and running in just a few minutes with a standard standalone Kinect sensor unit (widely available at retail outlets).

Requirements:
· Kinect for Xbox 360 sensor
· Computer with a dual-core, 2.66-GHz or faster processor
· Windows 7–compatible graphics card that supports DirectX 9.0c capabilities
· 2-GB RAM (4-GB RAM recommended)
· Visual Studio 2010 Express (or other 2010 edition)
· Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0
· For C++ Skeletal Viewer samples:
· Microsoft DirectX SDK June 2010 or later version
· Microsoft DirectX 9
· For Speech sample (x86 only):
· Microsoft Speech Platform SDK and Runtime, version 10.2 (x86 edition)
· Kinect for Windows Runtime Language Pack, version 0.9