Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

$2,000 Bounty For Open Source Xbox Kinect Drivers

Posted by Soulskill on from the helping-everybody-to-look-dumb dept.

ptorrone writes "Open source hardware company Adafruit Industries is offering a $2,000 bounty for the first person or group to upload driver code and examples under an open source license to GitHub for the Xbox Kinect released yesterday. The Kinect sensor outputs video at a frame rate of 30Hz, with the RGB video stream at 32-bit color VGA resolution (640×480 pixels), and the monochrome video stream used for depth sensing at 16-bit QVGA resolution (320×240 pixels with 65,536 levels of sensitivity). The open hardware group would like to see this camera used for education, robotics and fun outside the Xbox." The bounty was originally $1,000, but Microsoft's dour response induced Adafruit to double it. ("With Kinect, Microsoft built in numerous hardware and software safeguards designed to reduce the chances of product tampering. Microsoft will continue to make advances in these types of safeguards and work closely with law enforcement and product safety groups to keep Kinect tamper-resistant.") In addition, the Xbox 360 dashboard update that preceded Kinect's launch contains upgraded anti-piracy restrictions.

6 of 274 comments (clear)

  1. Kinect for Robotics by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    This would actually be excellent for robotics! Those specs are about on par with Point Grey's Bumblebee2 stereoscopic camera (the cheapest standalone stereoscopic camera for robotics), which retails at about $3,000! It would be great to be able to make cheap robots with that kind of stereoscopic imaging power.

    1. Re:Kinect for Robotics by BlueRaja · · Score: 5, Informative

      What Microsoft said was they are "confident that every unit of Kinect sold to gamers will generate profit." That doesn't mean they are making a profit on each unit.

  2. Re:Is reverse engineering still legal ? by kimvette · · Score: 5, Informative

    Wrong.

    Reverse engineering (section 1201(f)). This exception permits
    circumvention, and the development of technological means for such
    circumvention, by a person who has lawfully obtained a right to use a
    copy of a computer program for the sole purpose of identifying and
    analyzing elements of the program necessary to achieve interoperability
    with other programs, to the extent that such acts are permitted under
    copyright law.

    Source: http://www.copyright.gov/legislation/dmca.pdf

    --
    The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
  3. Re:Is reverse engineering still legal ? by mikael_j · · Score: 4, Informative

    The BIOS wasn't, it was reverse engineered by clone makers.

    --
    Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
  4. Re:law enforcement by spire3661 · · Score: 5, Informative

    MPEGLA would beg to differ. They can and DO dictate what is done with hardware after the sale. Even when the buying party has no formal contract with MPEGLA, they can restrict whatever you film with your equipment that you bought. Its wrong, it should be illegal, but so far they have been successful in cowing people.

    --
    Good-bye
  5. Re:Kinect _SOFTWARE_ for Robotics by coniferous · · Score: 5, Informative

    Not true at all. Look at the hardware spesification sheets... An arm processor and 512 megs of ram? Thats more then just a webcam and a couple of mics. There is some serious potential for having a hardware device that does some onboard processing.