Microsoft Releases Kinect for Windows Software, and Here Comes the Porn!

Today Microsoft (MSFT) will reportedly release its Kinect for Windows software development kit. Developers are excited to get the inside track on creating for the 10-million sold motion controller, but I suspect the most excited group is the porn industry. Having already hacked into the open source device, the adult folks can now have a field day making the Kinect do its bidding.

Master of your domain
WinRumors' Tom Warren broke the SDK story and listed three major features:

• Robust Skeletal Tracking for high-performance capabilities that track the skeleton image of one or two persons moving within the Kinect field of view
• Advanced Audio Capabilities, including four-element microphone array with sophisticated acoustic noise and echo cancellation for great audio; beam formation to identify the current sound source and integration with the Windows speech recognition API also included
• XYZ depth camera for standard color camera stream access and depth data that indicates the distance of the object from the Kinect camera

The features will be a major boon for interactive pornography on the PC. First, by recognizing multiple people, the Kinect can support couple-oriented, as well as, ahem, solo entertainment. Second, the higher-quality audio recognition could mean better responses to the user's demands. Finally, the depth camera translates into a more accurate onscreen avatar. In short, the official Kinect software thins the barrier between you and the action.

Sneak peek
We've already gotten a peek at the results last winter: The porn game company ThriXXX had a prototype Kinect title up and running days after the Kinect came out. Microsoft made the Kinect open source, meaning that anyone with the technical know how can look at the Kinect code and modify it to their liking.

Open source projects are usually done by smaller companies, but larger producers like Microsoft can use it to get more people to create software for their devices. The cliché is that pornography drives tech adoption, as I talk about in my book Porn & Pong: How Grand Theft Auto, Tomb Raider and Other Sexy Games Changed Our Culture. I argue that Microsoft knew that porn -- a consequence of open source -- would help spread interest in Kinect.

Even if Microsoft were to regress on its open source policy and place usage restrictions on its SDK, tech-savvy porn engineers have likely already reverse engineered the Kinect software. In other words, porn will be populating the Kinect universe, but today's SDK release will just make it faster.

Photo courtesy of LuChOeDu // CC 2.0
Related:

• Kinect-able Porn: Microsoft Pays the Inevitable Price for Open Source
• Microsoft at E3: Forget Games - Hey, Here's Live TV on Your XBox!
• Do You Use Google, Yahoo!, or AOL? You're Part of the World's Largest Sex Survey

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