How to get started with Kinect for Windows on Windows

The Kinect for Windows sensor can be programmed, controlled and used in your code easily on Windows. Getting started is really easy.

1. The Kinect has a USB input and power input. Plug the power input to a power socket and the USB input to a USB port on your computer. The light on the Kinect should turn on to green color. If the light does not turn on or it is red in color, then something is badly wrong at the hardware level. The green light on the Kinect will blink slowly. This is all right since it indicates that the Kinect is not currently controlled by any computer. Though Windows has detected the Kinect device on its USB port, it cannot yet control it because it does not have the necessary Kinect drivers.

2. Go to the Kinect for Windows webpage, download the Kinect for Windows SDK and install it. This provides the Kinect drivers and a library that provides basic access to the output of Kinect. Once this installation is complete, Windows should be able to detect your Kinect and its light should glow green steadily. That is, it should have stopped blinking now.

3. It is highly recommended to install the Kinect for Windows Developer Toolkit, since this provides higher level libraries, API, sample codes and tools. This can be downloaded from the Kinect for Windows webpage too and installed.

4. After installation, it is time to take the Kinect out for a spin! Open **C:FilesSDKsToolkit v1.7.0*. You can see that it is full of binaries of various Kinect programs. Try them out! For example, the Kinect Explorer tool should show you the color, depth and audio output of your Kinect.

5. To get started on programming the Kinect, head over to **C:FilesSDKsToolkit v1.7.0*. You can see the C++, C# and VB source code of the sample programs here. This should get you started on hacking your Kinect.

Tried with: Kinect for Windows, Kinect for Windows SDK 1.7, Kinect for Windows Developer Toolkit 1.7.0 and Windows 7 x64