Microsoft has celebrated the first birthday of Kinect by announcing a lifetime sales of 10m units moved.

This is somewhat in contrast to the astonishing opening sales that gave it 8m total unit sales in the first 60 days—a fact that landed the Microsoft Kinect in the pages of the Guinness Book of World Records as the Fastest Selling Consumer Electronics Device. This essentially means that in the past 10 months since that stellar debut, the record sales fell back to a more normal pace and only bred about 2m sales total.

To celebrate this birthday, Microsoft has minted a new advertising campaign directed at the UK to move even more of their product with a video entitled, “The Kinect Effect.”

“Something amazing has happened,” it begins. “The world has started to think of things we hadn’t even thought of. Unexpected things. Helpful things. Beautiful things. Inspired things. Which is why even though the world keeps asking us what we’re going to do with Kinect next, we’re just as excited to ask the world the same thing.”

Just as this product started out as an interesting consumer-based video-game device, the Kinect quickly exploded into the realms of academia, education, when it was caught on that the role of gesture-detection might have applications for almost everything humanly possible

The resulting fanfare and explosive adoption of the technology has lead Microsoft to announce the release of a commercial version of their Windows SDK for the Kinect. We’ve already seen it adapted for education, surgery, presentation, and a myriad of other uses as a powerful tool for human-computer communication.

Something wonderful has happened. Now, we’ll have to wait and see how Microsoft continues to push it into enterprise applications. I know I’m on the edge of my seat looking forward to it.