Open-source hardware company Adafruit has declared open season on Microsoft's Kinect, offering a $1000 bounty to anyone who can write and release open-source drivers for the camera.

Kinect, released today for Xbox 360, is expensive for a video game peripheral, but inexpensive considering its built-in hardware. It has an RGB camera, depth sensor, and multi-array microphone. But as we observed yesterday, it's Kinect's proprietary software that provides full-body 3D motion capture, facial recognition, and voice recognition capabilities.

"Imagine being able to use this off the shelf camera for Xbox for Mac, Linux, Win, embedded systems, robotics, etc." Adafruit writes. "We know Microsoft isn’t developing this device for FIRST Robotics, but we could! Let’s reverse engineer this together, get the RGB and distance out of it and make cool stuff!"

The OK Project is Adafruit's first attempt at a contest of this kind. Any person or group to upload working Kinect code and examples under an open source license to GitHub will be awarded $1000. The code can run on any operating system but must be open-source. Adafruit even invites Microsoft to participate.

This isn't much like finding an open driver for a printer. It's more like jailbreaking the iPhone. The Kinect has its own processor, and the code powering it operates several different pieces of hardware and does a lot of preprocessing before sending it out to the console. The human-anatomy and facial-recognition software is especially tricky. But that doesn't mean it can't be done.

In an email, Adafruit's Phillip Torrone writes that the company "would like to see this camera used for education, robotics and fun outside the Xbox." That does sound like Microsoft's bag, and I'd bet many people in the company in those fields have plans for the tech behind Kinect. Sadly, I doubt they'll be tripping over themselves to help hack the company's own camera.

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