Matt Bell moves about an elevated podium in a conference room overlooking San Francisco's Market Street, using a camera on the Microsoft (MSFT) Kinect to snap photos of the podium from different angles. Bell, 31, has hacked into the machine—originally designed for playing games on Microsoft's Xbox gaming console—and is using it in sync with a personal computer. He's showing his creation to a crowd of 50 rapt software developers.
He aims to harness Kinect's 3D camera and sensors to craft software that can be used by real estate agents or people selling items on EBay (EBAY). Bell is among hundreds of programmers using the technology to build everything from games that help people cope with Parkinson's disease to tools that let robots detect obstacles.
"Hackers love to experiment with new technologies and see what is possible with them—and there is just so much that has become possible, thanks to the Kinect," Bell says. "The Kinect is the first consumer-level device that can see in 3D."
Some hackers can wreak havoc with gaming consoles and the systems connecting them, as Sony (SNE) learned after cyberattacks on the PlayStation network led to the theft of data on more than 100 million accounts. Hackers targeted Sony in April in retaliation for the company's effort to keep programmers from tinkering with its PlayStation 3. The incident may cost about 14 billion yen ($173 million). Nintendo, maker of the Wii gaming console, says it, too, was targeted in an online-data attack, although it lost no personal or company information.
Microsoft, by contrast, stands to benefit as developers such as Bell pave the way to wider use of its motion-sensing technology.
Record Sales for Kinect
The Kinect, which lets users play digital games with their bodies, is history's fastest-selling consumer electronic device, according to Guinness World Records. That's helping to boost demand for the Xbox: Sales in the unit that includes gaming consoles rose 14 percent to $1.9 billion in the March quarter, making up 12 percent of total company revenue and helping Microsoft compensate for weakness in its online division, as well as sluggish adoption of the new version of Windows for phones.While developers such as Bell tinker with Kinect without obtaining Microsoft's blessing, the company has said it will soon release the code to let programmers build on the technology for noncommercial uses. A kit for developers who want to build products for sale will be available at a later date. "Kinect represents the first incarnation of the next big thing in computing—a world where computing is becoming more natural and intuitive," Stephanie Wettstein, a spokeswoman for Redmond (Wash.)-based Microsoft, said in a statement. She declined to specify release dates.
Bell, who holds a computer science degree from Stanford University and formerly worked for Google (GOOG), didn't want to wait. He assembled about 10 hackers for a December meeting in Menlo Park, Calif. Their ranks had grown fivefold by the time of the May 24 meeting above the Westfield Mall, near San Francisco's Union Square. There, they tap away at open laptops perched on rows of tables while Bell manipulates images of the podium into a 3D image that can be viewed from any angle. "We can now capture 3D in an affordable way," he says. "Previously, if you wanted to reconstruct a scene in 3D, you would have spent thousands of dollars."
