Earlier this week, a hacker successfully broke into the newly launched Microsoft Kinect webcam based motion controller to be able to transmit monochromatic images tracked by Kinect to a computer. With this hacking done, it was just a matter of time before we got to see more improvisations.
Hacker Theo Watson has now released a OS X port for libfreenect, the open source Kinect driver that was released recently. The new port, a video demo of which you can see embedded below, lets the user run those very monochromatic images from Kinect on a computer running OS X.
This is still not in a very useable form since it does nothing more than transmit your body movements in monochromatic images. But considering the quickness with which these breakthroughs have been achieved, expect for a lot more custom builds to be released shortly.
The hardware itself is nothing ground breaking. You can put this together from currently available devices. The magic is in the software that Microsoft developed. They solved a huge problem in skeletal mapping. Its good there are open drivers, but they are just that drivers for the PC/Mac to talk to the device.