As I wrote about a while back, Microsoft’s hacked Kinect is currently being developed to control robots that will perform delicate surgery on human patients. But it isn’t going to stop there. Only the limits of human imagination will stop the uses for this new technology that may one day be as common place as the telephone is today.

Will you be one of the innovators?

What me? You Ask. Yes you. The Open Kinect drivers were developed by a 20 year old Spanish man who entered and won the AdaFruit open Kinect drivers contest. He developed a complete suite of open source drivers for Linux, Windows 7 and OS X. His work is being constantly updated by the millions of other hackers that participated in the contest. So if you know a little programming (OK, you need to be a good programmer or at least willing to learn.), you can be part of the new frontier.

ASUS recently released the Xtion PRO for sale in Japan. It is basically an open source Kinect that works directly with a PC. They are running a contest with a $20,000 grand prize for development of applications and games using this new platform.

ASUS also plans to release a consumer version called WAVI Xtion that will let users stream content from their PC to their TV wirelessly with the built in WAVI transmitter and then control the content with gestures.

Like I said, the Kinect revolution will definitely change the way we do things.