This article is more than 1 year old

Kinect hacked for OS X

Irony value high: motion tech first offered to Mac maker

The open source driver for Microsoft's Xbxo 360 Kinect add-on has been ported to Mac OS X - an irony given that Kinect developer PrimeSense originally punted the motion detection tech at Apple.

Kinect was released in the UK this week, but debuted in the US a little sooner than that, giving coder AlexP the chance to run Kinect off a Windows machine before the peripheral had even shipped over here.

Since then hacker Hector Martin a chance to code up libfreenect, an open source driver for Kinect. Mac hacker Theo Watson last night posted the results of his attempt to tweak the driver so it'll work under OS X.

Martin's work can be downloaded here, Watson's here. Here's Watson's video of the driver running:

Says Watson: "Most of the code is unchanged but there are some changes to libusb which were needed to get it running - and a few extra libusb commands - as well as some tweaking of the transfer sizes."

According to PrimeSense CEO Inon Beracha, Apple had the chance to get there ahead of Watson.

Beracha told website Cult of Mac this week that he pitched the technology to Apple in 2008, but - perhaps not surprisingly - the Mac maker wanted to tie him up in red tape, he claims, so he quickly took his toy elsewhere. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like