Kinected Browser Lets You Flick Through Websites

mikejuk writes "The Kinect is well supported by a good and evolving SDK on the desktop, but until now using it in a browser wasn't easy. Now Microsoft Research has a free JavaScript API, Kinected Browser, that lets you integrate the Kinect with HTML. The bad news is that it only works on Windows 7 and 8 and in desktop mode only. In addition the browser has to be IE9 or IE 10. The good news is that more programmers know how to do HTML5 graphics than know how to work with DirectX or .NET. As a result this could lead to another burst of innovative Kinect applications."

Re:To limited an Audience

[Vanderhoth]

Back up there Tex. You have to specify the complexity of your application and what version of IE you're supporting before you claim it only takes an extra 15 minutes of work. I work on a large site and up until two months ago I was required to support IE 6, 7, 8 and 9. I found out two months ago as of February 2012 we're no longer supporting IE 6 and as of February 2013 we won't support IE 7, IE 8 support is slated to be phased out starting in the fall of 2013.

Web apps, epically those that require javascript, can be very complex and supporting IE 6, 7 is not trivial for larger applications. IE 8 is not so bad, but still requires effort. IE 9 is better, I'm hoping IE 10 will get it right and I won't be required to code for everything, then re-code for IE. Although I'll still have to make modifications for IE 8 and 9

I can develop an application in Firefox and with no additional effort it'll work in Opera, Chrome and Safari, but the same application without modification will not work in IE 6 or 7, sometimes not in IE 8 and on more rare occasions not in IE 9. No web developer will agree supporting IE only takes an extra 15 minutes, unless they only support IE and even then there can still significant effort involved in porting to the other versions of IE. I've had clients tell me not to worry about IE once I told them what effort would be involved in porting a large application. Of course we try to support as many users as we can, but sometimes the amount of effort to grab that extra 20% just isn't worth spending double or triple the effort in development and testing.

Feel free to tell me to get off your lawn.