Yes, hacking sounds very bad, but there’s always ethnic hacking, which they call “For the Greater Good of Humanity”. Sounds very holy right? Anyway, before this people have been able to hack the Wiimote for all sorts of funky and cool projects, and now it’s the Kinect’s turn. A hacker by the name of Florian Echtler took that open source driver and hooked the Kinect into his self-developed multitouch UI “TISCH” software library.

The result is a bit of MS Surface-style multitouch picture shuffling and zooming, but it uses full body tracking instead of touchscreen input, of course. Florian had this to say in the video description: “I thought I’d get the mandatory picture-browsing stuff done so it’s out of the way and everybody can focus on more interesting things.” Well, it’s still a great achievement good sir. And, if you’re a Mac lover and wanted to have your fair share of things, then you’ll have to thank this guy Theo Watson who has ported the ‘libfreenect’ over to OS X.

SOURCE via TUAW