Kinect, which is a portmanteau of the words "kinetic" and "connect", is a motion sensor developed and released by Microsoft. It provides a natural user interface (NUI) for tracking and manipulating handsfree user inputs such as gestures and skeleton motions. It can be considered as one of the most successful consumer electronics device in recent years, and we will be using this novel device to build the Fruit Ninja game in this book.

We will focus on developing Kinect and AR-based applications on Windows 7 or higher using the Microsoft Kinect SDK 1.5 (or higher) and the C++ programming language. Mainly, we have introduced how to install Kinect for Windows SDK in this chapter. Linux and Mac OS X users can first read the Appendix, Where to Go from Here, which provides an alternative method to call Kinect functionalities on other systems. Developers of .NET, processing, or other language tools may also find useful resources in the last chapter of this book.

In the next chapter, we will learn how to start and shut down the Kinect device in our applications, and prepare a basic framework for further development.