Open Source Microsoft Cube Toolkit Released

In partnership with the Microsoft Cube team, Stimulant has released a toolkit which attempts to ease many of the challenges associated with developing experiences for the Microsoft Cube. The toolkit is also helpful for anyone building applications which use multiple Kinect for Windows v2 sensors, just in case you haven’t been had the chance to work on the real Cube. The v2 Kinect SDK supports only one sensor per machine, so for installations using multiple sensors, it’s necessary to use multiple computers communicating over a network. The toolkit includes a “Kinect Transport” application which sends depth and skeleton data to other machines over TCP. It also includes examples of how to consume that data in Cinder, Node.js, Processing, and Unity. The protocol is fully documented so that any environment which speaks TCP can now work with Kinect v2, not just those natively supported by the Kinect SDK. When working on an experience that consists of application instances on multiple machines, it can be inconvenient to rapidly build and deploy across all machines when iterating on code. To make this process faster, the toolkit includes a deployment tool which watches your output project, and relaunches it on each machine as soon as you compile. If you find these utilities helpful, definitely let us know. If you find a bug or make an improvement, please enter an issue or pull request.