It is rumored that Microsoft plan to release the beta of Kinect for Windows SDK this week during a special developer event on Thursday. Microsoft is planning to stream a Channel 9 special event at 9:30AM PST on Thursday to celebrate the release of Kinect for Windows SDK beta. María Garaña, President of Microsoft Spain, revealed on Wednesday that Microsoft plans to make the SDK available this week.

Microsoft's Kinect for Windows SDK beta is set to include support for:

Robust Skeletal Tracking for high-performance capabilities that track the skeleton image of one or two persons moving within the Kinect field of view

Advanced Audio Capabilities, including four-element microphone array with sophisticated acoustic noise and echo cancellation for great audio; beam formation to identify the current sound source and integration with the Windows speech recognition API is also included

XYZ depth camera for standard color camera stream access and depth data that indicates the distance of the object from the Kinect camera.