Microsoft Kinect SDK Refresh

The first public version of the Kinect for Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) beta was released on June 16, 2011. Since then, many developers and innovators started to experiment new natural user interface (NUI) leveraging the Kinect sensor. A few days ago a refreshed version of the SDK has been released: the community has provided Microsoft with a lot of good feedback, and this release addresses some of the top items.

The Kinect for Windows SDK beta is a non-commercial SDK which enables human motion tracking, voice recognition, and depth sensing on PCs, enabling developers to create innovative natural user interface applications. The SDK includes drivers and rich APIs for raw sensor streams and natural user interfaces, as well as installation documents and resource materials.

The refresh includes:

• Driver enhancements: stability fixes to prevent crashes, including those that appear when a PC goes into sleep mode;
• Runtime enhancements: refinements to a number of APIs, improvements in time-stamping, and the removal of non-functional APIs to alleviate confusion (they will be reinserted if and when the functionality becomes available in future releases);
• Many improvements to the documentation, including clarifications and the deletion of information pertaining to non-functional components;
• Enhanced SDK samples

If you’re an academic researcher or an enthusiast who wants to take advantage of the latest developments in natural user interface experimentation, you can download the Kinect for Windows SDK beta refresh. A new refresh of the Kinect for Windows SDK beta is planned for release later this year.

Currently I’m supervising a Computer Science Master Degree thesis project which will bring a Kinect NUI to a home-automation device for elder and disabled people, based on Windows Embedded Standard 7. Stay tuned for updates on the project!

BUILD Windows, Live in Turin

Mark this date on your calendar: Tuesday, September 13th! From 3.30 PM, in I3P (Polytechnic of Turin), BEPS Engineering  and TTG (Torino Technologies Group) will present some of the latest Microsoft technologies for Embedded devices.

Later, live from Anaheim (CA), Microsoft BUILD keynote will be live streamed: in 1995 Windows® changed the PC. BUILD will show you that Windows 8 changes everything.

Here’s the complete event agenda:

15.30 Registration

16.00 Welcome and presentations (Beppe Platania & Marco Russo)

16.30 Kinect applied to Embedded (Gianni Rosa Gallina)
How to use Kinect SDK with Windows Embedded Standard 7

17.15 Mango: the new Windows Phone 7 operating system (Alessio Galdi)
Mango new features, new SDK, application registration

18.00 Live from Anaheim Convention Center (California) we will watch BUILD keynote which will be full of great news about the future of Windows application development.

20.00 Discussions and social time

A gadget will be given to keynote attendees!

The event will be free, but a registration is required (for security reasons, seats are limited). To register:

http://communitydevtool.com/public/frmRegister.aspx?eventid=1003LONQBQTUNSQCMPGTJE

embeddedSPARK 2011 Winners

I’ve  just come back from Seattle, where me and the other finalists had a wonderful week. First of all… the results!

• 1st place: Sebastian Londoño, Colombia – ArS8VER
• 2nd place: Gianni Rosa Gallina, Italy - KitchenPal
• 3rd place: Marco Bodoira, Italy - Digital Blackboard

Congratulations to everybody and special thanks to Microsoft (great organizational work by Gitte-Lena, aka Steel) and the judges, Olivier Bloch, Samuel Phung and Mike Hall, for the great experience we had!

It has been a cloudy and cold week (in respect to Italian weather in this season), but no rain and, in addition, a few days we had a warm and pleasant sun! We could visit Seattle and Microsoft Campus in Redmond all the way round, we met some Microsoft people and talked to them about Windows, Windows Embedded and the future. Great things will come, just have patience for some more months…

embeddedSPARK Challenge 2011 Finalist!

Yesterday evening contest finalists have been announced. I’m very glad to be one of them: KitchenPal entered the final round! Many thanks to the people who helped me to obtain this result: Anna, Alice, Antony.

Congratulations to the other two finalists and… see you soon in Redmond, Seattle.

Working on Phone 7

While waiting for the EmbeddedSpark 2011 Challenge results, in the last two weeks I started working on two Windows Phone 7 applications, just to put in practice what I learned during the Windows Phone 7 workshops I attended last month. One will help you with car fuel management, while the other one is for Italian people who like playing SuperEnalotto lottery. Here some preview screenshots:

The applications will be available on Marketplace for free, soon.

embeddedSPARK Challenge 2011 – Round 2

Here we are! Finally, after more than three months of hard work, KitchenPal prototype and its Mobile companion apps are ready.

You can see them at the official challenge entry page.

This time I made it. It's been hard but really fun and interesting. Results will come soon…

Windows Phone 7 Workshops

Microsoft Innovation Center Torino - ISMB organized in March and April a series of events dedicated to the new Windows Phone 7 platform. An introductory day to the platform at the beginning of March, two Hands-on-Lab days on March 22-23 and a Windows Phone 7 Proof-of-Concept on April 19-20.  All the events were conducted by two expert speakers from DevLeap, Luca Regnicoli and Katia Egiziano. I had the possibility to attend to all the events: very interesting and technically exceptional.

The last event was the most interesting one and consisted of a two-day instructor-led workshop aimed to create a real-world skeleton for a Windows Phone 7 app, with the help of Luca and Katia. Some companies participated at the event and proposed a couple of ideas/architectures to be implemented.

Katia assisted each of us with practical user interface design and suggested how/when to use Panorama and Pivot controls, how to create compelling, usable and good-looking views with Blend, marked the importance of Metro interface principles (typography, motion, content not chrome, honesty) and showed us sample UIs she made for ThinkAhead Phone 7 applications.

Luca, instead, helped with development issues, suggestions, practical problems and taught us the basics for a real-world, modular, loosely-coupled N-layered architecture: the key concept for successful applications!

Really interesting. If you have a chance to follow such kind of events, don’t miss them!