Remember the $2,000 bounty for a hacked version of an open source Kinect driver? Well, someone managed to “break” Kinect, so to speak, but did not do it out of the love of money (how noble). Hector Martin (@marcan42) of Marconsoft, on the other hand, managed to reverse the MS Kinect USB protocol (in layman’s terms, that means hacking the device) while releasing the open source Kinect driver for public consumption. We do not know the identity of the person who picked up the $2,000 bounty from Adafruit as said person was listed as “NUI member”, but who thinks that he could be Hector Martin in disguise? Now to await other homebrew developers take full advantage of the hacked driver to bring homebrew programs that might make Kinect a hot ticket item this holiday season. You can download the open source Kinect driver here.
Filed in . Read more about Hacking, Kinect and Open Source.