Hacking the Xbox Kinect

I have to start this post with a whinge, I pre-ordered Xbox Kinect from JBHifi. When I pre-order something I do expect it to get to me on the day it gets released or at least the day after. We finally got our Kinect here at the office after it was already released for over a week. I could have just walked  down the street and picked on up.

but that is not what I want to talk about here. It is all setup in our reception area and we already had a lot of people trying it out and loving it.

There are some very smart people out there and it only took 3 hours before the Kinect was hacked and an open source driver was created so you can use it on your PC, a little later on your Linux box and then on your Mac.

and what are people doing with it? They are creating some awesome things. Here is a small collection of the things I came across:

Best interactive Puppet

Have your own lightsaber

Capture yourself in 3D

same guy in 3D with a little awesome surprise at 0:53 – watch it it’s worth it

use Kinect to control Windows 7

there are heaps more videos after the break

and even with multiple people

a guy creating molecules in a 3D space (awesome)

Kinect and robots – create a 3D map of your room

use Kinect to tell you what you are holding in your hand – object recognition

play piano with your feet

Gravity demo using Kinect

best Xmas lighting this year

using Kinect for Real World Interaction

Remember the Wii head tracking? Now there is kinect head tracking

and here is a Game I can’t wait to play on the Kinect

if you have some great hacks or found some that I have missed, please share them in the comments.

If you are interested in joining the community you can find some pointers here

I really hope we can find the time here to play around with it too.

@maniac13