Pictured: The KCB for the v1 sensor with face tracking Over the last year or so, Microsoft has really started to support to the creative coding community. They make great technology and love what we do with it, but sometimes the learning curve into their products is greater than what should be expected from the average code artist. Enter the Kinect Common Bridge . The idea behind the KCB is that Microsoft puts its own engineers and developers behind a piece of open source code that is as solid and reliable as anything they do on consoles, but makes absolutely dead simple for those who don't want to dig too far into buffer management and threading and what not. Wieden+Kennedy partnered with them to develop extremely convenient implementations of the library for the v1 and v2 sensors for Cinder . Because these libraries are both purpose-built for creative coding frameworks and they are outperforming their lower level counterparts, I've decided to focus on supporting the KCB libraries solely. The KCBs implement the native SDKs, so it is possible to swap out the block with only minimal code changes. Advanced features (ie, using the SDK directly in combination with convenience methods) is still possible. The legacy libraries will exist for archive purposes. The Cinder blocks are available here: KCB for v1 sensor: https://github.com/wieden-kennedy/Cinder-KCB KCB for v2 sensor: https://github.com/wieden-kennedy/Cinder-KCB2