Exciting times: version 1.5 of Kinect for Windows SDK and Runtime is now available! If you’re doing any development that uses the Kinect sensor for projects, you’ll want to make sure you have the latest and greatest. To read the official announcement, head over to the Kinect for Windows Blog > Kinect for Windows: SDK and Runtime version 1.5 Released post.

Here are some of the new features to help developers build cool stuff:

• Kinect Studio, our new tool which allows developers to record and play back Kinect data, dramatically shortening and simplifying the development lifecycle of a Kinect application. Now a developer writing a Kinect for Windows application can record clips of users in the application’s target environment and then replay those clips at a later time for testing and further development.
• A set of Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) to guide developers on best practices for the creation of Natural User Interfaces using Kinect.
• The Face Tracking SDK, which provides a real-time 3D mesh of facial features—tracking the head position, location of eyebrows, shape of the mouth, etc.
• Significant sample code additions and improvements. There are many new samples in both C++ and C#, plus a “Basics” series of samples with language coverage in C++, C#, and Visual Basic.
• SDK documentation improvements, including new resources as well as migration of documentation to MSDN for easier discoverability and real-time updates.

Be sure to check out the official announcement for all the new goodies!