This is a misleading title. The Kinect sensor has been hacked, but Kinect proper is a combination of hardware and software. Arguably the more interesting aspects of Kinect are in the software.
That being said, this is still pretty cool, it'll be interesting to see what people come up with using this technology.
Honestly the hardware is more interesting than the software. Yeah, skeleton tracking is cool, but the hardware is capable of so much more. 3D scanning, mapping, and localization for robots come to mind. With the microphone array built in, Kinect is basically begging to be the eyes and ears of a robot.
Right now the Kinect drivers can't do anything that a pair of cheap USB webcams can't. The only advantage seems to be the on-board depth processing instead of having to use something like OpenCV. http://opencv.willowgarage.com/wiki/
Completely wrong. Kinect is not a stereo vision system. It's the first consumer application of a completely new class of cameras which directly measures depth by the time of flight of a reflected laser beam. It's literally a 320x240 array of laser rangefinders. It's called a flash LIDAR camera, and the quality and robustness of the depth data is far beyond anything achievable from stereo vision today even with high-end cameras, let alone webcams.
edit: Actually, there seems to be some confusion on the Internet about exactly how Kinect's depth sensor works, and it may be more likely based on structured light scanning than LIDAR (though Microsoft has recently acquired some LIDAR startups). Either way, though, the depth data quality is far beyond any kind of stereo vision.
From what I understand, an IR pattern is projected on to the room and the cameras pick it up. The level of distortion in the pattern shows how far the object is. NOT Lidar. Probably a laser projector though.
The tech is nice, and it's nice that it's bundled up in one affordable package, but the real power in Kinect is in the software. Right now all that the drivers return is raw video and depth. It's what you do with that data that counts.
It's a cheap and off-the-shelf colour and depth capturing from IR structured light. That's nothing to scoff at. A pair of cheap webcams only gets you trying to do real-time depth processing from passive stereo and thats not easy.
Yeah, but it does make it easier and more accessible to those who don't hack with OpenCV every day. One could also argue that one can always build digital components from scratch instead of using something like an Arduino.
A pair of cheap usb webcams are pretty suboptimal for stereo vision. To start, they aren't synchronized. Plus you have to rig them somehow to know their relative positions. They may use rolling shutter, which is bad for stereo. It's not that it can't be done, but it's not easy.
That being said, this is still pretty cool, it'll be interesting to see what people come up with using this technology.