This is both a basic introduction to how the open source kinect driver was hacked together, as well as a general how-to on actually hacking any usb device. It gets a little technical, but should actually be fairly intelligible to anyone with a bit of technical know-how. I plan on digesting this at my leisure later.

http://ladyada.net/learn/diykinect/

It's pretty freaking cool, regardless, and gets deeply into the how-to more than the theory.

I can honestly say I don't understand that page. What are the benefits of hacking a Kinect, other than sticking it to MS?

You can use the hardware for your own purposes. It's got I think two cameras and an IR camera, plus an onboard processor. It's a pretty powerful little machine. With easily-accessible drivers, people could use it to do all kinds of neat stuff that it was never originally intended for. What exactly? Beats me. An O/S with facial recognition? Stick out your tongue to bring up task manager? Squint your left eye to strafe left? 3d chat... Projecting an image of your face into a 3d world... Games in Windows that use it... building 3d meshes of real world objects. I don't really know, but without the drivers, none of it would be possible. I guess we'll see if anything really cool comes out of it.

Here's an example of an interesting (though pointless) kinect hack made possible by the driver.

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6284291.ht ... op;title;2

A much more interesting not-gaming-related application of the kinect.

cool. Funny... the 3d mapping software (that showed the mapped area) was actually Maya. Which isn't mapping software, it's used for building 3d shapes and whatnot for games or video. I mean, it works, it's a fully 3d system, just found it amusing. Cool stuff though.

Here's another example... it's just using Kinect to pick up the shape of someone's arm/hand for hand puppet-type stuff.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/19/kine ... pet-video/

Sorry, no embed, it's Vimeo, not youtube. Not as useful as Peltz's link, but still cool. Best of all, this whole thing was coded in 1 day. That's pretty neat.

I've been avoiding posting more kinect hacks since it's all roughly the same kind of thing, but this is really cool.

Another kinect hack...this time to control an RTS (Ruse)

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/01 ... ent-596834

interesting hack, and pretty usable. I was more surprised how playable Ruse looked.

Well that was really good! Though for a 360 use, I'd rather see the majority of the camera movement on the pad, and maybe use the right hand to select and attack etcetc. It's amazing what peopel are churning out for this thing faster than Microsoft can do it! Aha!