Kinect Hacking: Prizes, MAC OSX drivers, App Contest, BOM 56USD, Picture-Browsing App

[iBotModz_Bot]

Since the release of the open-source PC drivers for the Kinect (LibFreenect), for which Adafruit Industries paid out the 3000USD bounty to Marcan/Hector and gave/donated an extra 2000USD to the EFF, there's been some more Kinect hacking progress:

 

* Here's what Marcan/Hector is planning to do with his 3000USD bounty:

Hector has decided to invest this bounty into hacking tools and devices for a group of people he works with closely (e.g. iPhone Dev Team members, Wii hacker team Team Twiizers, and a few others). They don�t have much expendable income to buy tools and devices to hack, and sometimes this hobby can be a bit expensive, this will be a good investment that will allow them to hack more and newer devices.

 

* MAC OSX Drivers

The LibFreenect sourcecode has been modified to work on Mac OSX. You can download the MAC OSX modded LibFreenect here

 

* Matt Cutts, head of Google's Webspam team announced a 2000USD Open Kinect App/Lib Contest:

I want to kickstart neat projects, so I�m starting my own contest with $2000 in prizes. There are two $1000 prizes. The first $1000 prize goes to the person or team that writes the coolest open-source app, demo, or program using the Kinect. The second prize goes to the person or team that does the most to make it easy to write programs that use the Kinect on Linux.

 

* Kinect's BOM roughly $56, teardown finds - From eetimes.com:

Microsoft Corp.'s Kinect motion-gaming add on for its Xbox 360 gaming platform carries a bill-of-materials (BOM) of roughly $56 and features chips made by PrimeSense Ltd., Marvell Technology Group Ltd., Texas Instruments Inc. and STMicroelectronics NV, according to a teardown analysis performed by UBM TechInsights.

 

Of the roughly $56 BOM, about $17 is attributed to the cost of the PrimeSense reference system, including the cameras, microphones and processor, UBM TechInsights said. Microsoft is planning to retail the Kinect system for $149, and stands to make a healthy profit on each unit, UBM TechInsights noted.

 

* Proof-of-Concept Kinect application by floemuc - a multi-'touch' picture-browsing tool running on Ubuntu Linux using libfreenect and libTISCH:

Here's my proof-of-concept HD video of using a hacked Kinect camera for multitouch-like interaction. Written using libfreenect by marcan42 and libTISCH (http://tisch.sf.net/) by myself.

I thought I'd get the mandatory picture-browsing stuff done so it's out of the way and everybody can focus on more interesting things :-)

http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/37Xr0NRRGp4cM-eUkHCtF1cGFhQ/0/di
http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/37Xr0NRRGp4cM-eUkHCtF1cGFhQ/1/di

 

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[matty0]

hahaha i (mac user) get drivers before windows users? hahaha what a crazy crazy world. nice work!

[gruntmods]

hahaha i (mac user) get drivers before windows users? hahaha what a crazy crazy world. nice work!

are you kidding me? Linux and mac are both unix based, theres a reason the mac port came first, it was less work.

[matty0]

duuuuuuh are they really?!?!?!?! i diddnt know that!!!!!

 

*sarcasm*

 

man you're thick hahaha