With the recent presentation at E3, Kinect is slowly making its debut into popular game franchises (like Mass Effect) beyond its original gimmick game appearances and Microsoft shows little chance of slowing down in getting it adopted by everyone. To this extent, they’ve released the SDK (Software Development Kit) that will allow programmers access to complicated internal controls that have only before opened up by exploratory homebrew hackers.

Of course, those homebrew amateurs have done pretty well for themselves, after cracking open Kinect for all to see long ago; Microsoft is just playing catch up after the world discovered that their motion-detection platform has vast manifold and myriad uses beyond controlling video games. As we’ve seen with Kinect Fun Labs, a product that makes use of the motion detection and scanning ability of the Xbox peripheral.

The SDK is currently only available for Windows 7 (with no expectation of how long it might take to open it up for other operating systems) but it’s a beginning. The benefits of a Microsoft-released SDK over homebrew will be that Microsoft can quickly give easy access to in-house developed updates, firmware, nooks and crannies, and optimization that homebrew explorers might have missed.

The Kinect for Windows SDK beta is a programming toolkit for application developers. It enables the academic and enthusiast communities easy access to the capabilities offered by the Microsoft Kinect device connected to computers running the Windows 7 operating system.

The Kinect for Windows SDK beta includes drivers, rich APIs for raw sensor streams and human motion tracking, installation documents, and resource materials. It provides Kinect capabilities to developers who build applications with C++, C#, or Visual Basic by using Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.

If you’re an interested developer, you can download the prepared SDK from Microsoft’s website.

Amid the numerous connections into the Kinect system that the SDK provides it will give unfettered access to the raw sensor streams, skeletal tracking, and advanced audio capabilities.

The raw sensor streams have pretty much already been cracked long ago by homebrew enthusiasts, but an SDK will contain a solid set of libraries pre-optimized for Windows 7; what we can probably expected is the previous homebrew hackers will pour over the libraries and upgrade their own. The libraries are often savant mixtures of corporate revelations and expert synthesis from the community—it can only enhance the nature of the open source drivers.

We’ve seen some extremely interesting developments explaining the skeletal tracking capacities embedded in the Kinect and the algorithms that go into its fuzzy logic.

However, this leads me to wonder, what about the facial recognition features? That’s not mentioned in the SDK press copy on the website and it’s a big deal for everyone who is wondering about the Skype-Microsoft acquisition deal. With the Xbox becoming the next-big-thing with living room Internet entertainment and also the focus of a potential telecommunications system that every gamer already has, facial recognition in addition to Skype will be a huge selling point.