Yesterday I hit the “Place Your Order” button on Amazon. I got an email from Amazon and on Feb 14 my Kinect for Windows will arrive at my doorstep.  Hopefully February 14th will mean this is a long term relationship with this technology. I have a lot to learn about it. I bought one of the only available books “Meet The Kinect” on amazon. It was full of a lot of stuff as I was reading it last night.  The book laid out a lot of history and hardware descriptions as well as some info about the technology stack.  I kept skipping forward to the programming pieces. I’ll have to slow down and actually read it in full.  The book did make me laugh in sections because the author really has a twisted sense of humor in some spots. When I first started reading the book, I honestly thought cool, gesture recognition as in Dance Central or the other XBox games.  I was really missing out this year. The broad range of stuff that’s being done with it is truly amazing. KinectFusion is actually doing 3d reconstruction maps with it and then interacting with the reconstructed map in a virtual manner. This bears a lot of possibilities for videography and editing software. There’s a researcher at UC Davis who is doing work to seem 2 Kinect streams into a whole 3d picture.  He’s also done some work to interact virtually in a 3d world.  Some of the ideas out there of using it to step into a virtual world for collaboration and education is truly inspiring. I can’t wait for it to get here but in the meantime, I’ll keep on reading and researching.