This is awesome - at work, we didn't have any PC drivers for Kinect either (and we weren't allowed to use the OSS driver), we actually had to resort to rigging up an Xbox Dev kit whose sole job was to dump out the Kinect data over UDP to a PC.
Awesome. Thought about picking up a Kinect when the indie created SDK was coming out, but the official one should be awesome. Can't wait - even if my 360 is red ringed...
anyone else planning on picking up a Kinect without owning a 360?
i own a 360 but haven't touched it in several months. bought my kinect 2 months ago. really just awesome to work with.
It depends. If MS is offering a complete SDK, then it's a whole nother ball of wax... unless you're on a Mac or linux distro. IANAL, but I also assume there will be legal issues with distributing a commercial kinect app without the express approval of Redmond.
the one we released (adafruit) with hector is open source, commercial use allowed.
to use microsoft's you'll need to wait until they allow commercial use (from what is reported that's later in the year, maybe even 2012).
Why legal issues? If MS was thinking ahead, they'd freely let people sell apps using the sensor. It sells more Kinects. You could pretty much bootstrap a whole app ecosystem based just on the Kinect (on Windows only thankyouverymuch)