Game2Growth and the Kinect for Windows SDK in June 2011
In June 2011 Microsoft released a software development kit for Kinect on Windows, and David Wortley of Immersive Technology Strategies said he was working with Game2Growth on serious games for healthcare and learning built on it.
Updated
What was announced
Microsoft launched the Kinect for Windows SDK on June 21, 2011 at an event at its UK headquarters in Reading for developers, academics and hobbyists. Kinect combines a 3D camera with a microphone array and can recognize faces and speech and track motion. The SDK was free for non-commercial use.
David Wortley wrote about the launch in the June newsletter of Immersive Technology Strategies. He saw wide potential for serious games in healthcare and in learning and development, and said he was already working with Game2Growth on possible projects while looking for further partners.
Microsoft pointed developers to a large amount of support material alongside the download.
What the toolkit contained
According to Microsoft Research, the beta was a programming toolkit for developers who build applications in C++, C# or Visual Basic with Visual Studio 2010 on Windows 7. It included drivers, programming interfaces for raw sensor streams and natural user interfaces, installation documents and resource materials.
Three features stood out. Raw sensor streams gave access to the depth sensor, the color camera and the four-element microphone array. Skeletal tracking followed the skeleton image of one or two people moving in front of the sensor, which makes gesture-driven applications easier to build. The audio features covered noise suppression, echo cancellation, beam formation to find the current sound source and integration with the Windows speech recognition interface. The kit also came with more than 100 pages of technical documentation.
The interest for serious games was body movement as an input method, which Wortley saw as promising for healthcare and for learning and development.
Engines, platforms and development cost
Wortley named the cost and time of building engaging applications as a long-running problem for serious games. Several companies had answered it by building their own game engines. He listed Truism, the serious games division of Blitz Games, PIXELearning with its Flash-based Learning Beans platform, and PlayGen, described as one of the leading UK developers of games for social good.
Some of these companies also let clients use their technology platforms to develop and share their own serious games and virtual assets.
What is true today
Microsoft Research still hosts the page for the SDK beta, which lists April 15, 2011 as the date it was established. The page now describes the kit in the past tense, as "a programming toolkit for application developers", and sends visitors to the Kinect for Windows product site for the latest version.
No current website for Game2Growth could be found, so the status of its Kinect projects is not known. No game is named in connection with Game2Growth's plans, so there is no game status to record.
Questions about Kinect and serious games
What was the Kinect for Windows SDK beta?
It was a Microsoft Research toolkit that gave developers access to the Kinect sensor's depth camera, color camera, microphone array and skeletal tracking from Windows applications.
Which companies had built their own serious games engines in 2011?
Truism, the serious games division of Blitz Games, PIXELearning with Learning Beans, and PlayGen were the examples given.
Does the SDK beta page still exist?
Yes. Microsoft Research keeps the page but describes the kit in the past tense and refers visitors to the Kinect for Windows product site for the latest version.