Free Kinect drivers released. Adafruit pays $3k bounty to hacker, $2k more to EFF

The swell hackers at Adafruit Industries have declared a winner in their cash-prize contest to reverse-engineer the Microsoft Kinekt controller and release a free/open library that would let hardware hackers incorporate it into their own projects. The winner is a fine gent named Hector, who says, “Here’s my take on the Kinect driver. Supports depth and RGB images and displays them on an OpenGL window. It’s very hacky right now but it does prove the concept ”

To commemorate Hector’s achievement, Adafruit is giving him $3,000 (he’s vowed to spend it on more hacking tools), and will donate a further $2,000 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

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One Response to “Free Kinect drivers released. Adafruit pays $3k bounty to hacker, $2k more to EFF”

Ken says:

November 12, 2010 at 5:21 am

I’ve to admit, I’ve been a huge Project Natal/Kinect skeptic ever because it was announced with that sham Milo walkthrough and an terrible lot of hyperbole. I’ve been trying to keep an open mind but the various rumors which have circulated about house, lighting and multiplayer points have been a cause for concern. The advertising decision that Microsoft took to put this in the hands of mainstream journalists and celebrities slightly than anybody who actually has experience and expertise writing about gaming was extraordinarily worrying.

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