Programmer creates Kinect PC drivers

Last week hardware company Adafruit Industries out out a $3000 dollar bounty for the first person who could get Microsoft's XBox 360 Kinect peripheral working on a PC.

Last week hardware company Adafruit Industries out out a $3000 dollar bounty for the first person who could get Microsoft's XBox 360 Kinect peripheral working on a PC. That prize has now been claimed, after the winner managed to create some PC drivers for the device just three hours after its European launch. There's a video of the successful hack in action below.

Hector Martin is the name of the programmer, who says that he's going to spend the Adafruit Industriesprize money on more impressive hacking equipment. The open source drivers are now freely available hereif you're technical and fancy playing around with them. Here's the video of the drivers in action.

The really exciting part of the drivers isn't so much the demonstration in the video above, but the potential for other programmers to develop new ways for our PCs to interface with Kinect. Here's hoping for a Minority Report style Operating System interface that'll let us navigate Windows by waving madly at the screen. It's certainly not impossible, this guy has already used the drivers to do this:

[via CVG]