Although released on February first. Major E-commerce sites like amazon.co.uk didn’t have it advertised until just a few days agolast week, and even then it was a pre order. Ebuyer.com had pre order status of February 29th and only 20 in stock. This soon changed to 5 in stock wednesday 15th, which is when i purchased mine to be delivered friday. Now however, ebuyer has 17in stock and Amazon are on sold out status, with other market place sellers in stock but all around the £200 mark. Ebuyer are £179.99 at the time of writing, at one point when i started writing the article, ebuyer had 103 in stock at £189
Things to note about Kinect for windows:
- It is not for XBOX
- The coding API has changes from the Beta (the beta is only for xbox kinect)
- The new SDK and driver will still work with xbox kinect it seems, though only for those with the SDK installed, a published application will only work with kinect for windows on machines that do not have the SDK, i.e. those just running the re-distributable drivers
- The rgb camera on the windows kinect has a much brighter video feed in darker environments
- The new kinect supports near mode
Some of the first major changes in the API is that the namespace is now Microsoft.Kinect instead of Microsoft.Research.Kinect.Nui, and the Runtime object has been replaced with KinectSensor. The KinectSensor has array properties so that multiple kinects can be detected. The new Quicksart videos can be found at http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/KinectQuickstart.
Useful web sites on changes to SDK and code migration etc
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/kinectforwindows/develop/release-notes.aspx
http://robrelyea.wordpress.com/2012/02/01/k4w-code-migration-from-beta2-to-v1-0-managed/