Developers seeking to take advantage of Kinect and Natural User Interface technology might just get a boost up from Microsoft this coming spring. The software giant has begun signups for their Kinect Accelerator program. The company will be accepting 10 best-suited startups into the program and will provide them with everything they need to succeed.

“Every company participating in the Kinect Accelerator will receive an investment of $20,000, an Xbox development kit, the Windows Kinect SDK, office space, all the resources of BizSpark, technical training and support, and mentorship from entrepreneurs, investors and Microsoft executives intensely focused on making their business a success,” explains the Microsoft pitch for the Accelerator program. “At the end of the program, each company will have an opportunity to present at an Investor Demo Day to angel investors, venture capitalists, Microsoft executives, media and industry influentials.”

What qualifies for this program?

• Any Kinect-enabled application on Windows or Xbox that can be a commercial business;
• Manufacturing to retail, education to healthcare, art installations to gaming, social to interactive play…hmmm, the possibilities;
• Can be cloud-hosted, on any platform, but needs to be an application;
• Could be one view of an application that may also have a web UI, mobile UI, etc;
• Kinect-controlled applications, like what you have on your phone, but on a big screen or a computer screen;
• Content you might expect to consume in your living room or in an operating room.

The astounding popularity Microsoft’s hands-free controller system has been nothing short of a cultural innovation in gesture-based human interface. The fact that it came with a video game system gave it even more traction than any such device possibly would have gained in its inception; especially because video games give a brilliant proof-of-concept and are so pervasive that they

Participants have been given a deadline of January 25th, 2012.

According to an understanding from Microsoft Corp, this program will probably coincide with the release of the enterprise-grade Window’s drivers and software for the Kinect—currently slated for early 2012. We’ve already seen the drivers reverse engineered and released into the open source community, and a novel set produced to work with other cameras. The underlying technological concepts and algorithms have benefited hugely from entering into the open source space and the Maker community as hackers have taken the ideas behind the Kinect and run with it into every sphere of human-computer interaction.

We’ve seen the Kinect used during surgery for hands-free image manipulation, to assist with learning American Sign Language, and even become part of physical therapy and fitness training. Microsoft themselves have introduced the possibility of extremely innovative technologies using not just gesture controls, but facial expression recognition with communication enhancements like Avatar Kinect—the results of this interesting consumer-level technology could be endless.

It seems like Microsoft has been extremely slow to the gate in getting a program like Kinect Accelerator to the gate, but it’s almost here now. With a January deadline to sign up, if you’re part of the Kinect community and have a startup get cracking on your proposal now and beat the rush.