A year into the its life span, if you're still not convinced that the Kinect is going to be a major part of our lives in the near future, you must be on something. Maybe I'll restate that. If you don't think affordable depth sensing technology will be an integral part in the way humans interact with machines, you must be on something. The amount of practical time and money saving hacks that have come out within the last year have ranged from inspirational to mind blowing.

Greg Shirakyan provides the commentary for this impressive demonstration relating to Microsoft's RDS4 - Robot Development Studio 4. To illustrate the great Kinect integration that has been included in this latest version of RDS4, Greg uses the case of a photographer at a party. His job is essentially to go around capturing all of the fun everyone else is having, the whole time keeping an eye on the camera's remaining battery power and ensuring that the pictures come out just right.

The good folks at Evoluce have released their own noncommercial NUI applications for use with Windows 7. The program sports easy to use and intuitive applications dealing exhibitions, education, digital signage and healthcare. The Evoluce SDK for Kinect is only available for Windows 7 but it comes with all the necessary drivers, an NUI API, documents and other resource materials. Evoluce uses the OpenNI framework with NITE. Developers can create their own noncommercial applications using C++ and C# using Visual Studio 10.

A great video was put together by JasonJ Brown demonstrating the capabilities of iClone 5 integrated with a Kinect. iClone 5 is commercial motion capture solution available at reallusion.com.