The video above is a picture browsing application running in Ubuntu controlled using Microsoft's Kinect. It allows for a multi-touch like control without touching the surface - like the stuffs we see in Sci-Fi movies. (Click here if you cannot see the embedded video.)

Microsoft's Kinect is a marvelous piece of technology. However with Microsoft trying to lock it with only the Xbox while there could be several amazing uses for it, Adafruit announced a bounty for anyone who develop an opensource driver for it.

Hector Martin developed the driver and won the bounty. He also released the driver as libfreenect. Now we have the first application which use libfreenect to use Kinect as an input device.

Interesting stuffs await!

If you are in Ubuntu (Maverick, Lucid and Karmic) and have a Kinect to try it out, open the terminal and execute the following commands to install it:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:floe/libtisch
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libtisch libtisch-dev libtisch-csharp libtisch-java libtisch-python

[source]