CNet is reporting that Microsoft will officially launch its Microsoft Robotics Studio. “The software platform includes a 3D tool to simulate robotics applications; a services-oriented runtime that lets applications communicate with a wide variety of hardware; and a visual programming language that lets nonprogrammers easily program robots with a drag and drop icons.”
This is great to hear. Next up I’d like to see Microsoft launch a multi-camera and multi-image stream vision SDK. Intel has done quite well with its OpenCV vision SDK, however, there needs to be something that has a managed code SDK, simply because of all of the managed developers in the Windows world and ease of access to developers.
Why a vision SDK? First, more and more computers and mobile phones have cameras built right into them. Why not provide an SDK to work with their image streams? Already Microsoft provides imaging apps with their webcams, so launching an SDK seems like a great next step and will open up a whole new category of developer support not only for standard computers but also potentially for Robotics efforts, home security, interactive art projects, advanced cameras, and the like.