Kinect is finally and officially getting some official PC support from its creator Microsoft. The motion sensing camera-controller that was released for the Xbox 360 console last fall will be getting a free Windows 7-based SDK from Microsoft. The software tools will be made available sometime this spring and will be for "academic researchers and enthusiasts".

That means that anyone can create PC Windows 7 apps for the Kinect hardware with the SDK tools from Microsoft and release those apps for free (there is no support for commercial Kinect software under the SDK). As we have reported in the past few months, lots of software developers have already created their own PC applications that support Kinect including playing games like World of Warcraft and Minecraft with the device.