Strong Contender Already For Adafruit's Kinect Challenge

sammyF70 writes "Adafruit's bounty on open source drivers for Microsoft's Kinect may have been already won. Someone called 'KinectMan2' has posted videos of Kinect's output as seen on Windows 7 to YouTube. That was fast. Hopefully Linux drivers are coming soon." A few more details are available on a forum post the man made. Adafruit said the bounty could be his if he posts the source code, and they also upped the reward to $3,000 in response to another silly statement from Microsoft.

Comments

Streisand effect?

[francium de neobie]

Microsoft issued a pretty nasty response the last time this was posted in the public. That could have... helped.

Re:Streisand effect?

[91degrees]

The response seems prettty vague. Sort of

"MS isn't going to waste time finding out what this is. We'll just make some vague threats in case at some point in the future we think it might be harmful, just so there's no implicit endorsement"

Re:Streisand effect?

[Anonymous Coward]

MS also wants third party developers to develop for Kinect... it helps if they can convince third party developers that lots of Kinect sales implies lots of Kinects hooked up to XBoxes.

But will he opensource the driver ?

[Yvanhoe]

There is an article on engadget that says the guy doesn't necessarily want to publish his driver :
http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/07/kinect-does-hackers-bidding-but-not-for-fortune-or-fame-video/
Maybe that's why the bounty was raised.

Re:What's the hard part?

[drinkypoo]

The extent that the Xbox 360 OS resembles Windows 2000 is almost certainly miniscule at this point, as it runs on an architecture that is not supported by the Windows codebase and does not need most of the core functionality of a Windows OS (shell, explorer, etc).

NT4 had full PPC support, and Windows 2000 maintained at least some portability features because there was a release for Alpha. In addition, DirectX has to run on the Xbox operating system. For these reasons and others (being able to build the same game for Xbox 360 or for PC) it is a virtual certainty that the Xbox OS still deserves to be called Windows NT. It runs the same damned software!

where's the code- oh, they want $10k first

[Locutus]

it does look promising but it has me wondering if it's real since they have what Adafruit required in functionality but want an extra $7k($3k+$7k=$10k) to release the code and documentation. The original designer of the Kinect device technology( PrimeSense ) provides an SDK and DDK to work with it's reference design. What's to say what we're seeing in this video is not the PrimeSense SDK and driver and not a hack of the Microsoft Kinect USB data streams?

It could be real but it has my antenna up wondering how real it is. If PrimeSense didn't create the design and Microsoft did, then I'd be less prone to question this but we all know that the Kinect is a PrimeSense product with Microsoft's tweaking. It would be great if Microsoft did not encrypt or munge the USB data and it is to the original PrimeSense ref spec since PrimeSense is probably more inclined to want to sell chips and license the design as opposed to wanting to limit sales and tie sales to only one other device.

So show us that the supposed demo of Kinect's output is really from custom made software and not something either pulled from Microsoft or PrimeSense. Show us you're not just using their code to get $10K to do the real work of creating something which can be open sourced.

LoB