Kinect Open Source Driver Released for PC

Another Kinect driver has appeared, this time as open source and available to the public.

Earlier this week, a video appeared showing that AlexP of the NUI Group had "hacked" Microsoft's Kinect, granting full control of the motion-sensing device on the PC. Microsoft followed-up with an explanation that it wasn't necessarily a "hack," but rather merely someone had developed unsupported drivers for the Windows-based platform.

Now there are additional drivers developed for Kinect, this time from Hector Martin of Marconsoft. However unlike AlexP--who supposedly has no intention of making his drivers open source--Martin has released his Kinect drivers (Linux?) as open source and are now available for public use, located here.

"Horribly hacky first take at a Kinect Camera driver," says the README file. "Does RGB and Depth. Main.c implements a simple OpenGL driver. Hopefully it should be mostly self-explanatory... You pretty much just open the USB device, call cams_init(dev, depthimg, rgbimg), and your depthimg and rgbimg callbacks get called as libusb processes events."

The drivers are (possibly) the result of a lucrative $2000 bounty set by Adafruit for anyone who can provide open source drivers for Microsoft Kinect. Although AlexP of the NUI Group was considered as the first, the drivers weren't made public, so the reward may land in Martin's lap.

UPDATE: Engadget reports that the NUI Group will release an SDK and Windows driver as open source once they achieve $10K in donations.