It has been a busy two weeks. On the first of the month I was renewed for the Microsoft MVP program. I started out as a Client App Dev MVP many years ago and am currently an MVP in the Kinect for Windows program. I’m very grateful to the Kinect for Windows team for re-upping me again this year. It’s a magnificent program and the team is incredibly supportive and helpful. It’s also an honor to be associated with the other K4W MVPs who are all amazing in their own right and, to be honest, somewhat intimidating. But they politely laugh at my jokes in group calls and rarely call me out when I say something stupid. For all this, I am very grateful.
I’m often asked how one gets into the MVP program. There are, of course, midnight rituals and secret nominations as with any similar association of people. In general, however, the MVP is given out for participating in community activities like message boards (yes, you should be answering questions on the MSDN forums and passing your knowledge on to others!) as well as Code Camps like the one I attended this past Saturday.
My talk at the 2014 Code Camp Atlanta was on the Kinect for Windows v2. It was appropriately called “Handwaving with the Kinect for Windows v2” since the projector in the room didn’t work for the first twenty minutes or so of the presentation. I was delighted to find out that I actually knew enough to talk through the features of the new Kinect without notes, slides, or a way to show my Kinect demos and still remain relatively entertaining and informative.
Once the nameless but wonderful tech guy finished installing a second projector in the room as I was going through my patter, I was able to start navigating through my slides using hand gestures and this gesture mapper tool I built last year: http://channel9.msdn.com/coding4fun/kinect/Kinect-PowerPoint-Mapper-A-fresh-look-at-Kinecting-to-PowerPoint
Anyways, I wanted to express my appreciation for the early morning attendees who sat through my hand-waving exercise and I hope it got you interested enough to download the sdk and start trying your hand at Kinect development.