Beyond Kinect for Windows v2 - KinectEx

Kinect for Windows (K4W) and the Kinect v2 sensor are amazing for NUI development and I'm glad that we at IdentityMine have advanced projects where we can leverage this technology.
The K4W SDK already provides lots of nice APIs and a ton of samples to get started. Like usual, there's always more and an SDK can not cover everything but if the official APIs are well built, the open source community is always happy to provide functionality beyond the standard SDK.
One very good open source K4W project is KinectEx which provides some really cool features one often needs when working with K4W v2. KinectEx brings Kinect data recording and playback APIs, so it can be integrated in your own apps, multiple skeleton data smoothing algorithms and much more.
I've contributed a few changes to the project and the KinectEx author is really open for pull requests. Funnily does KinectEx also use one of my open source projects WriteableBitmapEx.

I just wanted to share this very nice open source project and spread the word.
You should definitely look into KinectEx if you are doing any K4W v2 development.

Moving on

Today was my last day at Schleupen AG. I worked there for 5 years as an enterprise developer mainly on back end and algorithmic topics, but also on the front end with .NET, Silverlight and more. We developed some really nice things there and I'm esp. proud of the parallel data processing pipeline which even works with .NET 2.
My co-workers were a great bunch of people, some became my friends and even the godfather of my youngest daughter and I became a godfather too. I thank them all for what I've learned and the great time we had. I wish them nothing less than the best for their future.

I started at Schleupen AG right after my studies and my diploma thesis "Parallelization and Optimization of an OpenGL CAD / CAM Application". I was always a computer graphics aficionado and passionate about physical simulation, image processing, computer vision, real-time computer graphics in general and interactive UIs with a great UX. Just for fun I started to work on some side projects, like this open source OpenGL fluid simulation in 2007, created a few open source libraries and also developed quite popular  Windows Phone apps such as Pictures Lab, Funny Faces, Helium Voice, Cloud Recorder and more. 

It's an exciting time to be a developer with so much things happening in this industry at the moment. Microsoft's own Surface tablets is just one piece we as software developers can leverage to shape the future. For me it's good fun to use these great new technologies like Windows Phone, Windows 8, WinRT, .NET, DirectX, XBox, Kinect, etc. to create nice experiences and I love to work on this all the time.
A few months ago I got an offer from IdentityMine and if you know their work, you can imagine that it was a no-brainer to accept this nice offer they made me. I'm really looking forward to work with state of the art technologies on exciting projects with experts like Laurent Bugnion and more great people. Another nice aspect of my new gig: I will work from my home office and will be closer to my 3 lovely daughters and wife. I will also be here during the last phase of my wife's pregnancy and can hopefully support her better. And yes, we're expecting our fourth child in September. :-)


Now I will enjoy a couple of days off with my family until I start my new job as Senior Interactive Developer at IdentityMine on July 2nd.