I've been monitoring Kinect since it was called Project Natal and I finally got my hands on one. I didn't have an xbox so I got the Xbox-kinect combo on what I perceive to be a very reasonable price.

Now, I was driven mostly by curiosity here. Sure, the kinect-enabled games are fun if you play with a group of friends. But I got kinect because I can think of a ton of commercial/retail applications that would benefit from it.

After playing for a few days, I think that kinect has great potential. You need to be a bit careful with the lighting, you need to have space (that minimum of 2 meters/6 feet of empty space is really required for games) and the sensor cannot be near a speaker or speech recognition is messed up. But all in all, I was thoroughly impressed.

My next obvious move was to see how I could hook up the kinect sensor to my PC and drive it from there. Since I got an xbox-kinect combo I also have a difficulty of not being able to directly connect it to a USB port but Microsoft has a connector adapter that I can get, so this shouldn't be a problem. But after some searching around I discovered, to my great surprise, that Microsoft does not have an SDK or even a PC-based driver for kinect. I also found out that there is now an active community that has already build the first open-source kinect driver (for details see this and this).

I really do not understand Microsoft's reasoning here. Kinect looks like a great sensor which can be used for applications other than games - this is evident because a lot of people on the OpenKinect project are investing their time and energy to come up with a decent driver. If I were in the shoes of Microsoft's product manager, I would definitely try to push as many sensors as possible and the only way to do that is to have software that uses it. To that end, I would made certain that a free Windows driver and a free SDK were available. Tying the sensor to a games platform makes no sense.

Any thoughts? Am I missing something big, like Microsoft losing money in every kinect sale?