SimuLord said:
There is a HUGE difference between idea diffusion (company makes motion sensor that can read and output distance, which leads to someone else attacking the same problem with all-original ideas, making something quite different) and theft of an idea (taking apart a Kinect to build a product with the same technological makeup.)
The former is best exemplified by Microsoft and Sony seeing Nintendo build the Wii and thinking "OK, let's build our own motion-control devices". All-original products from MS's and Sony's engineers don't step on Nintendo's intellectual property (well, maybe Move does, but that would be like Nintendo suing Sega for putting a D-pad on the Master System or Ford suing GM for putting a steering wheel on the first Chevrolet. There's a limit to originality-vs-pragmatism.)
The latter is, in a word, illegal.
That's not what they're asking for though.
This is the same class of hacking as getting a Wii remote (or even a PS2 controller) working on something other than the console it was originally designed for.
In fact, considering what the Kinect hardware is, that won't even get you very far, since a lot of the work is in the software.
Being able to recognise faces, voices, skeletal movements? - That's all software. Hacking the hardware will teach you nothing about how microsoft is doing this.
From the basic specs I've seen, the Kinect hardware isn't even anything truly new; It's just orders of magnitude cheaper than the systems that inspired it.
To my knowledge, the kinect consists of:
4 Microphones. - (software processing allows you to use these to deal with background noise more effectively. - Hacking the hardware output doesn't give you any of the code involved unless there is firmware doing some pre-processing)
1 RGB camera - Nothing special here; It's just something akin to a webcam. Anything interesting it does is all in software.
1 Infrared camera + 1 Infrared projector - This is a variant of a well known system for determining object depth. High end systems typically project a laser grid which the camera can use to determine distances of objects by how the grid is distorted. In this case, it's an infrared pattern being projected and then picked up by the camera.
Again, unless there's firmware on the device itself doing some kind of pre-processing, it'd be done in software.
Even if there is hardware pre-processing, that would most likely do little more than turn the raw image data into a depth map so that it's easier to work with.
1 motor - The device contains some kind of electric motor that allows it to move up and down to track people more easily.
But the article suggests they're not after the content of the firmware, neither are they trying to make copies of the device itself.
Rather, they want to know how the kinect outputs data, so that it can be connected to devices other than a 360 console.
Knowing how the hardware is constructed is very helpful in trying to decipher what kind of information it would transmit, and how it would most likely be formatted.
But what the hardware puts out is likely to be fairly limited compared to the supposed features of kinect.
