Within days of the Microsoft Kinect’s release, a set of open-source drivers surfaced letting people hack it to work with devices other than the Xbox 360. PC and Linux hacks appeared almost instantly. Now an independent developer by the name of Theo Watson has adapted an existing library to enable the Kinect to work with Mac OS X.

Watson calls the project a work-in-progress, which uses the open-source libfreenect by Hector Martin, a work-in-progress, but it does appear to be working just fine. The image in the video flickers a little bit, so a bit more USB optimization is in order. He said on a hosted vimeo page that most of the code remains unchanged, but some tweaks to libusb and transfer sizes were necessary to get the Kinect up and running. The latest update at the time of this writing works with OS X 10.6.3two down from the latest revisionand includes several bug fixes.

Anyone with the skills who wants to have a go at the source code can grab it from the vimeo page. To get it working, Watson recommends trying both available USB ports, and making sure that too many devices aren’t plugged in. Hey, it’s a work in progress; give it some credit.

Over the weekend, Google’s own Matt Cutts issued a second Kinect bounty, consisting of two $1,000 awards, for “the person or team that writes the coolest open-source app, demo, or program using the Kinect,” as well as the person or team that simplifies the process of writing Linux apps with the Kinect.

This came after Adafruit Industries first offered a $3,000 Kinect bounty for the creation of open-source drivers. Here’s a separate video from last week showing the Kinect running under Linux, with both RGB and depth cameras in operation. Note that this video appeared just three hours after the official release of the Kinect: