The Blitz Agency has demonstrated an software interface that allows non C++ applications to get the skeletal data from Kinect, and therefore makes it accessible to a whole new (application) world. Who knows what’s going to come out of this one, but it’s not hard to imagine a new realm of motion-driven casual games, and new user interfaces for applications that traditionally relied only on the mouse and keyboard.
How does this work? The Kinect libraries have been built to be accessed via the C++ language (the premier language for game development). However, Noah Gedrich (Director of Technology) and Yosef Flomin (Software Developer) at Blitz have created a C++ application that sends the motion information to Flash, Silverlight or Unity (a popular game engine). This will allow countless developers to rapidly deploy Kinect-based apps using a development environment that they are used to. Microsoft has always said that Kinect would go beyond Xbox, but we wonder if they saw that one coming (video in the full post).