Opening up the source: Microsoft's Kinect gets pushed beyond the videogame »

Around the world, a new community of hackers is coming together to take the Microsoft Kinect far beyond the videogame. Created for the Xbox 360 to enable controller-less game play, the Kinect's combination of sophisticated sensors and affordable price are opening up new possibilities for technophiles working in art, filmmaking, robotics and music. The open source movement springing up around the console is inspiring innovation, laying the groundwork for a fundamental change in how we interact with technology.

After the Kinect's November U.S. release, a race to crack it began. Motivated by a $2,000 prize promised by hardware kit company Adafruit Industries, open source enthusiasts frenetically got to work.

In true hacker spirit, Adafruit upped the bounty to $3,000 after Microsoft issued an ominous statement to CNET, stating that they would “work closely with law enforcement and product safety groups to keep Kinect tamper-resistant.”

A mere six days after the console was unleashed, hacker Hector Marcan broke through and uploaded his code. After submitting to Adafruit, Marcan also posted on the OpenKinect project — the center of the current cyclone of innovation founded by interface engineer Joshua Blake.

An open community of hackers, engineers and artists, OpenKinect is a communal effort to use the Kinect hardware with PCs and other devices with free, open source code.

How members decide to use this code is completely up to them. As a result, the Kinect has already been used in countless ways its creators never anticipated, from real-time 3D sculpting to creating a giant virtual piano, with new examples being uploaded to YouTube each day.

For Blake, who studied non-traditional interfaces in college and has been designing and developing applications for the Microsoft Surface software platform since 2008, starting the OpenKinect project was his way of pushing for change in the way we interact with computers.

Blake said that when he started OpenKinect, he “anticipated that perhaps a couple dozen, maybe a hundred people eventually, would join my OpenKinect mailing list and maybe we would put out a few neat concept videos. Instead there were hundreds and thousands interested. Right now there are more than 1,650 people on the mailing list.”

Plenty more after the jump >>