A Kinect Primer

http://hackadaycom.files.wordpress.c...pg?w=450&h=334
Yes, the Kinect is over one year old now, and after some initial unhappiness from [Microsoft], it’s become a hacker’s best friend. [Eric] decided to celebrate this with anArticle all about how it works. If you’re new to this piece of hardware and want to get into working with it, this should be a good hacking introduction. If you’ve been reading [HAD] lately, you will have noticed this information being used to “build a Kinect bot for 500 bones.”
Some interesting facts in this article include that the Kinect measures 307200 distance point, known as a “point cloud” in the gaming area. From this, it’s able to construct a 3D image of the environment around it and allow interaction. Such interesting hardware didn’t take long to hack after Adafruit announced a $3000.00 bounty to open it up to the masses. This only took four days to do, making one wonder why, with their incredible resources, [Microsoft] wouldn’t either more effectively lock it down or officially open it to be hacked and modified to begin with. Our vote would be to officially open it up, but no one consulted us on the decision.

http://hackaday.com/2011/11/13/a-kinect-primer/