The other day, I had so much fun with Xbox 360 with Kinect in a gaming shop! But I never had thought that Microsoft would give away the SDK for non commercial applications. Many things can be done with Kinect SDK, all we need is a Kinect device , Window 7 OS and Visual Studio 2010. To kick start , we can take refer Programming Guide and the SDK can be downloaded from here . Also there are some demos along with code available at MSDN channel9 .

Gesture based human computer  interaction methods can be easily implemented with the help of kinect. However, many such applications are possible with a simple web camera. Applications like Umouse an example for interacting through hand movements, AR toy from SourceBits which is an example for augmented reality using webcam. But Kinect make everything even more simpler with its infrared lazer projection and a camera together helps to convert the video data into 3D form, also it captures the Z – index of the object , i mean the distance between the device and the controller/object/user .

Following are few applications and demos which I found on youtube which helps to get inspired,

This guy has shown several short demos in youtube like one below,

another demo for Windows 7 interaction,

Kinect as a RC contoller

Kinect augmented reality experiments

Playing Mario with Kinect .. this is fun!!

I think Microsoft is much concerned on advanced user interface, like one which I found at the demo of windows 8 prototype, it was awesome and this kinect is a breakthrough technology which they have ever made. For the advanced future, with advanced and easy interaction , these technology would definitely help, especially when interacting with larger screens!