Making Kinections

So, I'm the proud owner of a brand new XBox 360 Kinect bundle.

I'm kinda giddy about it.

I'm quite happy about many other things too, like my internship.

See, internally it's a specialized PC (i386-compatible? ia64?) architecture. It plays fun games. It's one of the later revisions of the hardware, so ring-of-death and other issues have been worked out by all those who came before me. (Thanks!)

Also, the Kinect (with a $35 addition) can plug into the PC and use the libFreeNect driver to pull the 3-D and other informations out of it that the games on the 'Box can. See, I don't think dancing in place in front of a camera in order to make a figure on screen pretend to imitate me is going to be much fun--but driver and algorithm development, THAT will be awesome. :)D

I'm also pondering looking into rooting the box and installing Linux--but that'd require a hard drive as the installed nonvolatile memory is only 4GB. Also, I value it's Halo capabilities a touch more than I value its Linux or computing power. (What's in those things, anyway?) (I had to look it up. Check out the wikipedia article on its internals. Apparently it would be sweet for raw power's sake.) Thus, I probably will put that task off for quite some time. (I really wouldn't mind running Windows on it--I'd just love to have a general-purpose 3-core 64-bit PPC machine of my own.)

Biggest uses for it? Playing DVDs, playing games lots of people can play, and hacking the Kinect. That's about it. :)

(Microsoft, will you Please please please pretty please allow Steam to operate on XBox Live? I might even consider that grounds on which to get a paid subscription.:P)