Just days after launching in the States, the Xbox controller-free-controller has been hacked. You are the controller, indeed.
Open-source hardware dev Adafruit Industries originally offered up a $1000 bounty to the first person to crack the peripheral, saying “It’s amazing hardware that shouldn’t just be locked up for Xbox 360. Its ‘radar camera’ being able to get video and distance as a sensor input from commodity hardware is huge.” They later upped the ante to $2000 when Microsoft complained about it.
NUI Group’s AlexP claimed the prize, uploading a video of Kinect handled through a basic custom Windows 7 app to their forums yesterday.
“Under the hood, this Kinect device some pretty amazing hardware. The potential uses are numerous including HCI, robotics, educational, surveillance, motion capture, people/object tracking, etc. The depth sensing camera would ordinarily cost a couple orders of magnitude more than Kinect device itself,” he writes. “Having all this in mind, as a research project, I took a weekend challenge of getting this awesome new Xbox Kinect device to work on Windows 7. Here are the first tests of controlling the Kinect NUI Motor and reading the built-in accelerometer data from a PC. Outlook looks good for other sensors on the device (i.e. cameras and microphones).”
Predictably, Microsoft isn’t impressed. A spokesperson for the company responded, saying, “Microsoft does not condone the modification of its products. 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.”
Consequences will never be the same, etc.
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