A few days after Microsoft released Kinect (and years later Apple’s interest in the device), a motion-based game controller for the Xbox 360 console, a group of hackers managed to modify the device’s settings, hack it and let it run on Windows 7.
Microsoft of course isn’t interested in this kind of hacks and will never support such efforts – also because there’s not really much you can do with Kinect on computers. It “runs” and displays the images it captures from the camera, but you can’t do much after all.
Hacker Theo Watson, as reported by TUAW, wrote an OS X port of libfreenect, a library that enables users to run Kinect on computers. As you would expect from this sort of Kinect hacks, there’s not much to see. Kinect outputs information on the Mac’s screen, the video quality is pretty good but flickering sometimes, there’s no way to associate motion with functions. Perhaps something cool will come out of this, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Check out the video below.
