It is less than a week since Adafruit announced a bounty for reverse engineering drivers for Microsoft's Kinect hardware and the $3000 prize has already been awarded, with a further $2000 being donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.   

The stipulation was for open source drivers and that is what prize winner Hector Marcan has released. They have already been tested by other hackers and you can see a demo here:

Although gaming on the Xbox 360 is the impetus for this prize as I explained  in my article last week there are  many serious applications for the Kinect hardware and having open source drivers unlocks this potential. Microsoft, however, in not going to be pleased at having its proprietary software, which it insisted was protected from infiltration, hacked.

Now we can all get started developing software that makes use of the amazing hardware - unless Microsoft has a final trick up its sleeve.

Further reading:

$2000 bounty for open source Kinect drivers

Inside Kinect

3D Gesture Input 

How Kinect tracks people

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