One of the biggest pieces of news related to Microsoft's Kinect Xbox 360 motion controller (apart from the fact that the company from Redmond managed to push off the shelves around 100,000 units per day ever since the device has become available on the market) is that of numerous security researchers from all over the world managing to actually hack the accessory in order to grant it an enhanced level of functionality.
It all started when Adafruit Industries, an open-source hardware manufacturer, offered a reward or $1,000 to the first hacker or team to provide a completely open-source driver for the peripheral, a prize that was later on increased to 2, then 3,000 US dollars, and finally claimed by hacker Hector Martin, who came up with a driver allowing the Kinect to be connected to a Linux-running machine.
And now, one of the people from Adafruit, who goes by the name ladydada, provided Kinect owners from all over the world with a detailed guide regarding the whole Kinect hacking process, that should allow just about anyone with a bit of technical knowledge to reverse engineer the USB device in order to gain a higher level of control over the Xbox 360 motion controller.
While we won't get into actual details regarding the whole procedure (you can check out ladydada's exploits for yourselves) simply because it's way too technical for most people, we're pretty sure that quite a few intrepid researchers will allocate some time and resources in order to come up with all sorts of new and innovative uses for the Kinect.
After all, we've already seen some pretty cool implementations of the hacked device (multi-touch controller, 3D holographic camera), that might be available on the future for all platform users (including Mac OS X).
The only thing we hope (again) is that Microsoft will give up on its rather bullish attitude (“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," as per a statement to CNET), because, even if hacking its gaming-oriented product is, in fact, an illegal activity, it's nevertheless one that could help the company from Redmond actually enhance, over time, the control experience provided by the Kinect.
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