Hackers Take the Kinect to New Levels @ MIT Technology Review…

…Adafruit Industries, a company that supplies equipment to hardware hackers, helped kick off the race to hack the Kinect by putting out a bounty of $3,000 for software that could connect the device to a regular computer.

Both are excited about the future of the Kinect as an off-the-shelf sensor for everything from high-end robotics to art projects. Developers have created a steady stream of videos of different applications using the Kinect. “These videos are really just proof-of-concepts that show some of the possibilities for further development,” says Fried.

One of the most popular videos is of a 3-D interactive puppet. “It’s fun, it’s intuitive, and it’s something that would be really hard to do without this inexpensive, off-the-shelf component. As you bring down the barriers, people have room to get creative.”