The Kinect is a very intriguing piece of hardware, one with more promise than may seem immediately apparent. There was a rush to create working drivers for hackers and third-parties upon the hardware's release, and now that those drivers are freely available, the flood of third-party applications has begun.

Ars spoke to Florian Echtler, who created a program that allow you to resize and manipulate images. While the application is still in its early phases, Echtler claims that working with the hardware is easier than you'd expect. This is just the beginning.

Echtler's program began as a lark. "Having Hector's drivers made things very easy to start with, so it was just for fun at first." He's referring to Hector Martin, the man who won Adafruit Industry's $3,000 challenge to release an open-source driver for the Kinect hardware.

The process used to create the program shown in the video wasn't that tricky. "I've taken my existing multitouch library, libTISCH and basically just wrote a camera adapter," Echtler told Ars. The whole process took around half a day, but right now it's set up specifically for his living room. One of the goals he's working on is making the program more generic for use in multiple settings.

While people have brought up the possibility of using multiple Kinects to either increase the sensitivity of the hardware or to create a larger virtual space to move in, Echtler believes that won't work. He points out the hardware uses a structured light system to create its 3D tracking. Structured light systems use a known array of points of light, and then senses how that light is deformed in order to create a 3D image. Put two Kinects in the same space, and the hardware won't know how to deal with the extra points of light.

Replicating the secret sauce

Microsoft likes to make a big deal out of the proprietary software it has created to make sense of the data the Kinect spits out, but Echtler believes it's only a matter of time before it's replicated. "I suppose that won't take too long, at least on a proof-of-concept scale. Most of the algorithms used, e.g., for skeleton detection, are available freely in academic papers and have also been implemented in a research context," he said. "It's a matter of finding the correct pieces and putting them together, which can still be quite a task, but I believe it's entirely doable for a dedicated community."

Microsoft, however, seems actively hostile to the idea. "Microsoft does not condone the modification of its products," a company spokesperson said. "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."

Echtler finds that attitude short-sighted. "To be honest, I think [Microsoft] should be grateful for the free publicity. There's nothing in Hector's work which is the least bit illegal; even the DMCA expressly permits this kind of reverse engineering. It's probably more or less mandatory for the MS press guys to condemn any kind of hacking, tinkering or tweaking..."

"Kinect for Xbox 360 has not been hacked—in any way—as the software and hardware that are part of Kinect for Xbox 360 have not been modified. What has happened is someone has created drivers that allow other devices to interface with the Kinect for Xbox 360," Microsoft told GameSpot. "The creation of these drivers, and the use of Kinect for Xbox 360 with other devices, is unsupported. We strongly encourage customers to use Kinect for Xbox 360 with their Xbox 360 to get the best experience possible."

We're seeing increasingly impressive uses for the hardware, including the ability to move a live image in 3D space, and as the open source community explores what the hardware can do it's only going to get better. Microsoft may not approve of non-authorized uses of the Kinect, but the genie is already out of the bottle.