Hardware enthusiast site Adafruit — helmed by MIT grad Limor Fried and Make Magazine’s Phillip Torrone has laid down the gauntlet to hackers and hobbyists everywhere, offering up a bounty valued at $2000 to whoever can ‘hack’ Microsoft’s motion camera Kinect.

The end goal is to create an open-source USB driver that will allow for interoperability with devices beyond the Xbox 360, like PCs. Here are the deets:

What do we (all) want?

Open source drivers for this cool USB device, the drivers and/or application can run on any operating system – but completely documented and under an open source license. To demonstrate the driver you must also write an application with one “window” showing video (640 x 480) and one window showing depth. Upload all of this to GitHub.

How get the bounty ($2,000 USD)

Anyone around the world can work on this, including Microsoft Upload your code, examples and documentation to GitHub. First person / group to get RGB out with distance values being used wins, you’re smart – you know what would be useful for the community out there. All the code needs to be open source and/or public domain. Email us a link to the repository, we and some “other” Kinect for Xbox 360 hackers will check it out – if it’s good to go, you’ll get the $2,000 bounty!

Obviously, Microsoft isn’t too enthralled over the initiative, telling CNet in a statement that the company “does not condone the modification of its products,” adding that Kinect boasts “built in numerous hardware and software safeguards designed to reduce the chances of product tampering.”

We’ll see how long those security measures last. As we’ve seen time and time again, all it takes is a small yet dedicated band of hackers to thwart multi-million dollar anti-circumvention efforts.

The Open Kinect project – THE OK PRIZE – get $2,000 bounty for Kinect for Xbox 360 open source drivers (now $2k) [Adafruit]

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