At Microsoft, we are committed to providing more personal computing experiences. To support this, we recently extended Kinect’s value and announced the Kinect Adapter for Windows, enabling anyone with a Kinect for Xbox One to use it with their PCs and tablets. In an effort to simplify and create consistency for developers, we are focusing on that experience and, starting today, we will no longer be producing Kinect for Windows v2 sensors.

Over the past several months, we have seen unprecedented demand from the developer community for Kinect sensors and have experienced difficulty keeping up with requests in some markets. At the same time, we have seen the developer community respond positively to being able to use the Kinect for Xbox One sensor for Kinect for Windows app development, and we are happy to report that Kinect for Xbox One sensors and Kinect Adapter for Windows units are now readily available in most markets. You can purchase the Kinect for Xbox One sensor and Kinect Adapter for Windows in the Microsoft Store.

The Kinect Adapter enables you to connect a Kinect for Xbox One sensor to Windows 8.0 and 8.1 PCs and tablets in the same way as you would a Kinect for Windows v2 sensor. And because both Kinect for Xbox One and Kinect for Windows v2 sensors are functionally identical, our Kinect for Windows SDK 2.0 works exactly the same with either.

Microsoft remains committed to Kinect as a development platform on both Xbox and Windows. So while we are no longer producing the Kinect for Windows v2 sensor, we want to assure developers who are currently using it that our support for the Kinect for Windows v2 sensor remains unchanged and that they can continue to use their sensor.

We are excited to continue working with the developer community to create and deploy applications that allow users to interact naturally with computers through gestures and speech, and continue to see the Kinect sensor inspire vibrant and innovative commercial experiences in multiple industries, including retail, education, healthcare, education, and manufacturing. To see the latest ways that developers are using Kinect, we encourage you to explore other stories in the Kinect for Windows blog.