The Kinect is currently the hardware that provides developers with the greatest opportunities for innovative programs - both games and "serious" artificial intelligence applications. How does it work? How do you use it? What can you use it for?

Version 1.0 of the Kinect SDK is now available together with the Windows version of the Kinect hardware. Now you can get started creating full commercial applications. Our new e-book shows you how to do this in C#.

In the third chapter of our e-book for Version 1.0 of the Kinect SDK together with the Windows version of the Kinect hardware, we look at how to use the raw depth data that the Kinect provides to display and analyze a scene and create a live histogram of depth.

Kinect provides two levels of processed data - a skeleton map which gives you the position of the player's limbs and a user index which can be used to discover the player's overall position. In this chapter of our ebook on using the Kinect SDK for Windows we take a close look at the player index data.

The Kinect has both a video and a depth camera and they have slightly different viewpoints on the world. Relating their co-ordinate systems is the subject of this chapter of our ebook on using the Kinect for Windows SDK 1. We create a background remover along the way.

The ability to extract and track the positions of the human body is a remarkable feature of the Kinect, but how do you use it? It seems more complicated than the more basic video and depth outputs. Fortunately, once you understand the structure of the data returned, it isn't much more involved. We look at the simplest possible example.

So far we've covered the visual and depth inputs and started to look at skeletonization. In this part we get down to the bare bones of the skeleton and actually draw the whole thing.

A point cloud is a set of points in a 3D space. You can view the cloud from different angles and lighting conditions. You can even apply colors and textures to its surfaces. A point cloud is one step away from a full 3D model and sometimes it is more useful.