Microsoft’s Kinect technology, according to Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer, is the beginning of a new way of communicating with computers via a natural user interface, or NUI.

Increasingly, he insists, the computers that surround us will understand our speech and hand gestures. The machines, in essence, will become a bit more human.

Kinect’s ability to recognize physical objects of all kinds, including human faces, expressions, gestures and speech,  may lead to inexpensive 3-D design and modeling, photo-realistic human avatars, and “smart” displays that, for example, might be able to direct two different visual and audio streams to two people sitting in the same room.

Microsoft plans to offer software tools for developers that want to make money from writing applications for Kinect.