a new sensor

/theKinect

First Impressions

I just received the Microsoft Kinect for Developers from Amazon.  I intend to use it as the primary sensor for my robot; It has a lot of interesting features including an IR sensor, depth sensors, audio, camera, and a fantastic set of API's.  For the cost -200.00 U.S. dollars- it seems like the easiest place to start. After the unboxing I downloaded the Kinect SDK and Developers Toolkit 
-http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/kinectforwindows/develop/developer-downloads.aspx-
and spent a couple days playing with the code.  The two main development languages are C# and C++ and are numerous examples using both - I chose C# to get started. 


A side note, I have never coded in C# before, but I was able to get up to speed with the help of some tutorials posted by Microsoft 
-http://channel9.msdn.com/Series/C-Sharp-Fundamentals-Development-for-Absolute-Beginners. 
I spent a couple hours and was able to figure the rest out from there.

My first step was to just turn the sensors on and load the video into a window; next I played around with the face tracking API's. In all it was fairly easy to get things up and running, and to start doing some really cool thins with the data streams the Kinect has on offer.  Latter on I will post some videos with actual code.