In keeping up with the state of Kinect development, of course I saw the news that Microsoft has announced they will be releasing an official SDK (Gizmodo coverage). In my view this is a good step, but I don’t see it heralding a revolutionary increase in the sophistication of Kinect applications.

The good stems more from a support and community standpoint than anything inherent to the SDK itself. Official support will add legitimacy and potentially get some larger players into the game.  An official SDK also carries with it an implicit promise of stability in the API itself which will help foster a community of experienced developers and broader adoption. I further hope that this SDK will come with a strengthening of community support from Microsoft – releasing software is easy, encouraging and supporting the community who will use it is not.

However from a technical viewpoint this SDK is nothing really exciting. The press release only promises “access to key pieces of the Kinect system”, access which the hacking community has already provided fairly well. Sure there is a bit of a curve with finding and installing the necessary drivers and such, but that’s nothing a developer doesn’t deal with every day. The hard part of building amazing experiences with the Kinect isn’t this mid level layer, it’s the actor recognition, gesture tracking, and scene interpreting layers that are hard. Microsoft mentions nothing of including any of those pieces, not that I would necessarily expect them to since this is where offerings can differentiate themselves. Honestly, based on the early Xbox titles released, I would not say Microsoft has the lead in this space anyway. Compare the menu interactions between Kinect Adventures and Dance Central and tell me which is easier to use? This translation of inputs into experiences is the hard part and this is where the creativity is happening. This is also where we’re on our own.

So thanks for the SDK.  Sure, we’ll see more “pretty picture” demos, but turning that into interaction is still something that will need to be built.

Matt Cribbs, Group Director Technology, Organic, Inc.