Chapter 1, Kinect for Windows – Hardware and SDK Overview, introduces the Kinect, looking at the key architectural aspects such as the hardware composition and the software development kit components.

Chapter 2, Starting with Image Streams, shows you how to start building a Kinect project using Visual Studio and focuses on how to handle the color stream and the depth stream.

Chapter 3, Skeletal Tracking, explains how to track the skeletal data provided by the Kinect sensor and how to interpret them for designing relevant user actions.

Chapter 4, Speech Recognition, focuses on how to manage the Kinect sensor audio stream data and enhancing the Kinect sensor's capabilities for speech recognition.

Appendix, Kinect Studio and Audio Recording, introduces the Kinect Studio tool and shows you how to save and playback video and audio streams in order to simplify the coding and the test of our Kinect enabled application.

The following hardware and software are required for the codes described in this book:

The reader can also utilize a virtual machine (VM) environment from the following:

This book is great for developers new to the Kinect for Windows SDK and those who are looking to get a good grounding in mastering the video and audio tracking. It's assumed that you will have some experience in C# and XAML already. Whether you are planning to use Kinect for Windows in your LOB application or for more consumer oriented software, we would like you to have fun with Kinect and to enjoy embracing a multimodal interface in your solution.

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: " The X8R8G8B8 format is a 32-bit RGB pixel format, in which 8 bits are reserved for each color."

A block of code is set as follows:

<Grid.RowDefinitions>
    <RowDefinition Height="Auto" />
    <!—- define additional RowDefinition entries as needed -->
</Grid.RowDefinitions>

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

public partial class MainWindow : Window
{   private KinectSensor sensor;
    public MainWindow()
    {   InitializeComponent();
        this.Loaded += MainWindow_Loaded;
        KinectSensor.KinectSensors.StatusChanged += KinectSensors_StatusChanged;
    }

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Select the WPF Application Visual C# template".

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