No need to be jealous of your Xbox-owning pals. The Kinect motion-sensing peripheral for Microsoft’s console has already been hacked to work with a PC. The Kinect is basically an infrared webcam with a set of special software that lets Kinect-enabled Xbox games interpret the images. It’s not such a big stretch to make it work with a Windows PC, and as you can see in the video below, it just needs the right drivers to be able to sense your body then relay that information to a PC, and the folks at Code Laboratories did so.
This is, of course just the first step in making the thing actually function with a game, but we can expect many modders and hackers to find ways to get it to interact with some sort of entertainment software, especially since there already a few webcam-based games out there already. You may also find yourself with the option of using motion-sensing to perform mundane computer activities, like web surfing.
Microsoft does not condone this sort of mucking around with their hardware, and has not made any comments regarding an official set of PC drivers or games. However you shouldn’t act too shocked if and when an official PC release gets announced in the next year, along with PC ports of some of the most popular Kinect-enabled XBox games.
