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While Apple plays cat-and-mouse games with iPhone jailbreakers, Microsoft is playing a far friendlier game with Xbox Kinect hackers.

Two Microsoft employees went on the radio Friday and said nobody was going to get in trouble for making open-source drivers for Xbox Kinect. In fact, they said, Microsoft was “inspired” by how fans and hobbyists were adapting its camera.

Ira Flatow interviewed Microsoft’s Shannon Loftis and Alex Kipman along with NYU prof Katherine Isbister about the technology behind Kinect along for NPR’s Science Friday. A listener asked via Twitter about the Adafruit-led effort to reverse-engineer and create open-source drivers for the device. That led to this exchange:

Ms. Loftis: As an experienced creator, I’m very excited to see that people are so inspired that it was less than a week after the Kinect came out before they had started creating and thinking about what they could do.

Flatow: So no one is going to get in trouble?

Mr. Kipman: Nope. Absolutely not.

Ms. Loftis: No.

Flatow: You heard it right from the mouth of Microsoft.

This is a reversal for Microsoft. Just two weeks, ago, a Microsoft spokesman told CNET that “Microsoft does not condone the modification of its products” and that the company would “work closely with law enforcement and product safety groups to keep Kinect tamper-resistant.” This prompted electronics hobby-supply company Adafruit to increase its bounty for open-source drivers from $1,000 to $3,000 and add a $2,000 donation to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, just in case Microsoft decided to start suing the pants off of everybody after all.

Why the turnaround? Clearly, somebody realized that amateur programmers using the Kinect for cool, creative projects was great advertising for Microsoft, while marching in with jackboots and cease-and-desist orders wasn’t. But it also gave Microsoft the ability to clarify precisely how the Kinect had and hadn’t been “hacked.”

As Kipman notes in the NPR interview, “Kinect was not actually hacked,” at least in the sense that an insecure web site, database or transmission might be hacked:

Hacking would mean that someone got to our algorithms that sit on the side of the Xbox and was able to actually use them, which hasn’t happened. Or it means that you put a device between the sensor and the Xbox for means of cheating, which also has not happened. That’s what we call hacking, and that’s why we have put a ton of work and effort to make sure it doesn’t actually occur.

According to Kipman, the USB output that transmits the color, depth, motion and audio detected by the Kinect was left open “by design.” That’s an artful way to say that Microsoft’s security concerns were — and are — elsewhere: hackers tampering with the cameras to intercept the stream to spy on users, going up the stack to the console or network.

If Kinect is seen as a fun, versatile device for both casual gamers and serious hobbyists, that’s great for Microsoft. If Kinect’s whole-room camera, robust facial-recognition software, and portal for video and audio chat are seen as in any way insecure, it’s a nightmare.

That’s why Microsoft came out with a hard-line initial response. Once the company saw how the open-source drivers were being used, and what they could and couldn’t do, it was easier to officially soften its stance.

Photo credit: Yakpimp/Creative Commons

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Spurred on by cash prizes, cool applications and the glory of getting code to work, Xbox Kinect hackers have opened up the camera and have it running on full throttle. Here’s a short list of what’s been done in just one week.

• Hector Martin was the first to post open-source drivers to Github and a proof-of-concept video, winning $3000 for himself and $2000 for the Electronic Frontier Foundation as part of Adafruit’s Open Kinect contest.
• Google software engineer Matt Cutts sponsored another $2000 contest for people who used the newly-found open-source drivers to run a cool application. Because apparently, numeric depth sensor output isn’t very cool. Cutts proposed some potential projects, the first being “A Minority Report-style user interface where you can open, move, and close windows with your movements.”
• Within a day, a user with the handle Flomuc adapted Hector’s code to use multitouch-style pinch-and-spread gestures to manipulate photos with Kinect running on Ubuntu Linux.
• Meanwhile Theo Watson was likewise able to port the now rapidly-developing open-source drivers to run Kinect on Mac OS X.

Pretty cool, if you’re into this sort of thing. Me, I’m holding out for someone to beat Matt Cutts’s second challenge to hackers:

What if you move the Kinect around or mount it to something that moves? The Kinect has an accelerometer plus depth sensing plus video. That might be enough to reconstruct the position and pose of the Kinect as you move it around. As a side benefit, you might end up reconstructing a 3D model of your surroundings as a byproduct.

To paraphrase The Social Network, Kinect on a MacBook just isn’t that cool. You know what’s cool?

Kinect on a robot. Controlled by a junior high student. That’s what this is about.

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Over the weekend, a member of the NUI Group hacked the new Xbox Kinect to run on Windows 7, posting proof-of-concept videos, but not the code.

“As a research project, I took a weekend challenge of getting this awesome new Xbox Kinect device to work on Windows,” writes Alex P, who previously hacked the PS3 Eye camera to run on Windows. “Here are the first tests of controlling the Kinect NUI Motor and reading the Accelerometer data from a PC. Outlook looks good for other sensors (ie cameras and microphones) of the device.”

A day later, he posted the following video of the Windows-controlled Kinect with on-screen output from its depth and color sensors:

Open-source hardware company Adafruit has offered a bounty for open-source Kinect drivers, upping the reward to $2000 after Microsoft threatened legal action against anyone opening up their peripheral.

Engadget reports that Alex P isn’t interested in the reward, preferring to use it with Code Laboratories’s $150 video suite CL Studio Live.

DIYers, robots and children all hoping to leverage the Kinect for educational use did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

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At some point in the future, many more everyday objects will have tiny embedded chips that can communicate with networks. But just as we’re debating net neutrality and the value of the open web vs closed client applications, we will have to decide who will control the internet of things, too.

Lines are already beginning to be drawn. Ashlee Vance, writing for the New York Times’ Bits blog, profiles chipmaker ARM’s efforts to bring the internet of things to the masses with its mbed project.

The goal of mbed is to make building prototype objects and programs easier for people who aren’t necessarily used to writing programs or hacking at the guts of electronic devices. It has two main components: a simple $59 microcontroller, and an online drag-and-drop program compiler. This user video by steveravet shows mbed in action, rewiring a Billy Bass novelty talking fish to say funnier things:

Ultimately, though, the idea is to create practical applications to help users in the field. ARM’s Simon Ford told the Times: I want to see how you get people to experiment. Maybe a washing machine repair man will figure out how to get the machines to report back to him and revolutionize the machines to get a competitive advantage. The point is that I dont know what theyll be used for.

Now, at Adafruit Industries’ blog, DIY-engineering all-star Limor Fried counters the Times’ warm enthusiasm for ARM’s approach with some ice-water skepticism: “mbed requires an online compiler, so that you are dependent on them forever. You cannot do anything without using their online site, ever.”

Fried adds: “We like the hardware in the mbed, the cortex series is great (its why we carry an ARM Cortex M3 board now) but the ARM compiler used with mbed costs about $5,000 so maybe it will never be anywhere but online.” Adafruit notes that similar ARM boards are available with entirely open-source libraries.

Free and open-source vs. ready-for-anyone-to-use out-of-the-box: we’ve been down this road many times before. I doubt this argument will have a clear winner and loser, but it’s important that it’s clearly framed and articulated now, before any one approach gets locked-in as the default option.

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Limor Fried’s MintyBoost project is a great example of DIY and commercial tech working together. Take an Altoids tin, a couple of AA batteries, and some very smart hackery, and you’ve got a lightweight USB charger that you can use to charge/run your handheld iWhatever, or almost any other phone, camera, or small device that can take a charge off USB power.

Reverse engineering Apple’s secret charging methods from adafruit industries on Vimeo.

Clive Thompson profiled Fried and her company Adafruit Industries as part of a 2008 feature in Wired on “open source hardware.” The idea is that hackers like Fried can use what they find out about consumer devices to make and sell their own products, but also to produce DIY kits and share information with others who then build their own projects.

As a case study in the value of sharing this information, consider Rob Scott. Before he took his son on a week-long bike trip, he used Fried’s schematic to hack together what turns out to be a really striking-looking solar charger for his son’s iPod.

It’s always nice to see what the maker community is doing to accessorize their retail gadgets; the results aren’t always super-polished, but they generally solve real problems in important use cases that don’t get addressed by manufacturers, either because they’re too unusual or they can’t be easily solved by more plugs, more peripherals, more complex devices that cost a lot of money. And in turn, we all find out a little bit more about how these magical devices get put together and how they work.

See Also:

• DIY Graphing Calculator Is Built From Open Source Hardware
• Why Arduino Is a Hit With Hardware Hackers
• Beautifully Hypnotic Video Details Canon Macro Lens Hack
• Hacker Stuffs MiFi Inside iPad, Ruins it in the Process

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