By Barry Levine.
"When you're the reason for a fast-growing parade, it might be a good idea to move to the front. That's apparently Microsoft's newest strategy with its announcement Friday that its Kinect motion controller is open "by design." "
The revolutionary Kinect, which allows users to control Microsoft's Xbox 360 video-game console with hand or body motions, has spawned a burgeoning cottage industry of programmers who are adapting it for other devices and purposes. Initially, Microsoft indicated it did not "condone" such adaptations.
'Inspired' by Innovation
Now company officials appear to be endorsing the movement.
Xbox Director of Incubation Alex Kiptman said on National Public Radio's Science Friday program that "what has happened is someone wrote an open-source driver for PCs that essentially opens the USB connection, which we didn't protect, by design, and reads inputs from the sensor." Microsoft Game Studios Manager Shannon Loftis added that she is "inspired" that the community is finding new uses for the product.
Both executives indicated that partnerships with academic researchers might soon be forthcoming, in order to seed the device in labs where new uses can be found.
Whether they are called hacks or not, the modifications are piling up. Programmers are rapidly adapting the device, which enables in-the-air gestures reminiscent of the movie Minority Report, for a host of uses that aren't necessarily related to the Xbox 360.
The first major innovator was programmer Hector Martin, who recently announced he had adapted the Kinect's motion-capture system to work on a PC -- a Linux-powered laptop with OpenGL drivers. He won an electronic kit-making company's $3,000 prize, which had been offered to the first person to use an open-source driver with the device.
Light Sabers, Virtual Puppets
Recently, Google engineer Matt Cutts announced two new $1,000 rewards for "the person or team that writes the coolest open-source app, demo or programming using the Kinect."
Other programmers have reported making the Kinect work with Windows 7 and Mac OS X computers, and earlier this month University of California-Davis researcher Oliver Kreylos announced he had used the two cameras in Kinect to create a 3-D video camera. There have also been experiments enabling a user to wield a Star Wars-like virtual light saber, or to use an arm as a real-time controller for a virtual bird puppet.
Microsoft's new encouraging tone is quite removed from its initial reactions. Following Martin's announcement, the company issued a statement that it "does not condone the modification of its products," adding that "numerous hardware and software safeguards" are intended to reduce the chances of "product tampering." It later admitted that, in fact, Kinect software and hardware were not actually modified.
Jeffrey Hammond, an analyst with Forrester, said the changing tone from Microsoft is the result of "some internal evolution" within a big company. At first, he said, there was a "knee-jerk reaction to protect intellectual property," but now "some cooler heads have realized that 'this is exactly what we want.'"
He said the innovations around the Kinect "are very exciting," and "the sky's the limit" for what can be done with "a low-cost movement-detection system."
cant wait