Microsoft. Once a software company, now one of the giants of the new digital age. It hasn’t gone away you know?
This week is the first birthday of Microsoft’s Kinect Xbox 360. Only one year in and people from around the world have started re-imagining the potential of Kinect and the platform is now open to some third party app developers. It is no longer just about games.
“Almost immediately following the launch of Kinect, hobbyists and academics from around the world embraced Kinect possibilities in ways that surprised and delighted,” wrote Frank Shaw, Microsoft’s corporate communications chief.
Microsoft believes, and it’s hard not to disagree, that the ‘Kinect Effect’ will change computing as we know it.
“We saw Kinect being used by therapists and physicians as part of a rehabilitation program for stroke victims, as a skill-building technique for children with autism, and as an application for hospitals in Spain enabling surgeons to scroll through medical images in the operating room with gestures so they could avoid the need to re-scrub. Incredible stuff,” says Shaw.
Microsoft will open up its software development kit (SDK) to commercial businesses next year. A big move that could potentially transform the fortunes [and the future] of Microsoft. It is already working with 200 companies across 25 industries to create new applications for Kinect. The future of computing is unwritten, but with Kinect it appears to be limited only by the imaginations of creative developers.

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