Adafruit said they’d offer $3,000 to the person who essentially open-sourced the Kinect. Well, as you recall, Hector Martin released the first open source, free as in beer drivers to the wild and the contest is over. The Kinect is cracked.
We know this subsidized / commodity hardware can now be used for robotics, art, science, education and more. For $150 it’s loaded with tons of great sensors and cameras – now it’s unlocked for creativity. We expect to see a Chumby hacker board and/or BeagleBoard using a Kinect for it’s vision-system robot soon! Who knows FIRST robotics might use these for their next robotic competition.
Here is the new OpenKinect Google Group for more information but as of right now you can grab the driver here and rock out.