When Kinect, Microsoft's latest add-on for the Xbox 360 game console, was released worldwide in November 2010, it was the beginning of a success story, but not in the way Microsoft may have been expecting.

The peripheral, which uses a camera and motion-capture software to allow for gaming without the use of an actual controller, has been like a flame to a moth for hackers. Consequently it wasn't long before the potential of the system beyond gaming was being explored.

To the joy of the independant programmer community worldwide, only a week after the Kinect's release, a hacker named Hector Martin developed an open-source driver that gets hold of the camera data so that anybody can experiment with the camera freely. Within days of the hack, numerous sites popped up devoting themselves entirely to the cause, such as kinecthacks.net.