// the find
wouterverweirder/kinect-azure
Nodejs library to access the azure kinect data from the official SDK
A Node.js/Electron native addon that wraps the Azure Kinect SDK, giving JavaScript access to the depth camera, body tracking, point clouds, and IMU data. It's for creative coders and installation artists who want Kinect-style skeleton tracking in an Electron app without writing C++ themselves.
The C addon covers the full sensor surface — RGB, depth, IR, body joints, point clouds, and IMU — which is more complete than most community wrappers. Body tracking (skeleton joints in 2D and 3D, user masking) is the hard part and it actually works through the Body Tracking SDK. The Electron examples are concrete and runnable, not just pseudocode. Having a companion kinect2 library from the same author means the API style is consistent if you've used that hardware before.
Pinned to Sensor SDK v1.4.1 and Body Tracking SDK v1.1.0 from 2020 — those are not the current versions, and the Body SDK in particular has had breaking changes. The native addon build story is rough: node-gyp on Windows, PATH manipulation for DLLs, no prebuilt binaries, which means anyone on a non-standard Visual Studio layout will spend an afternoon fighting it before writing a line of JS. 79 stars and the last meaningful activity is 2024 suggest this is close to unmaintained. The Azure Kinect hardware itself was discontinued by Microsoft in 2023, so the addressable audience is people who already own the device, not new buyers.