14 DAY TRIAL // The hacked Microsoft Kinect saga seems to be growing with each passing day, with more and more people from all over the world bringing all sorts of interesting new additions to this “story” in the form of various applications that enhance its original functionality, the latest we've come providing a whole new level of functionality for Mac OS X users.
As you'll certainly remember, a chap by the name of Theo Watson ported the hacked Microsoft Kinect drivers from Linux to Mac OS X, a short while after the original version had appeared online.
He hasn't stopped there, actually participating in the development of yet another very interesting application for the hacked Kinect, namely the large virtual puppet-bird we've talked about in an earlier article.
Nevertheless, it would seem that someone else has picked up on Theo's work and took it to the next level, since another developer called Robert Pointon has created a super-simple Kinect application for Mac OS X, namely a standalone Cocoa App (no external dependencies) that actually enables users to hook up the Kinect to a Mac running the aforementioned software directly, without even getting near the drivers.
According to Robert, his application uses unchanged code from libfreenect – the aforementioned open source drives for Kinect (including pending pulls for motor and accelerometer), and enables point cloud and surface visualisation, auto rotation/stabilisation via accelerometer and some crude calibration.
Much like everything else related to the Kinect hacking community, the app is open source, so everyone can test whether it works or not on their own systems.
Now, of course, while Microsoft has sort of “shuffled” its stance on Kinect hacking, things might be a tad different in the case of Mac OS X and Apple, given the latter's notoriously closed environment.
But, then again, if Microsoft has come up with the Kinect, who's stopping Apple from developing their own motion-tracking controller...sort of the iTrackMotion, or something of the kind?