Microsoft's Kinect camera for the XBox has been one of the more popular hacking targets recently,
mostly due to the bounty for an opensource driver by adafruit & Johnny Lee. Here's a brief timeline:
Nov 4th, 2010: Kinect release USA
Nov 10th, 2010: Kinect release EU
Nov 10th, 2010: libfreenect opensource driver released
Nov 11th, 2010: very first "Kinect Hack" with libfreenect by myself :-) (see below)
I was able to create this so quickly because the data delivered by the Kinect is nearly identical to that
from a camera-based touch screen. So all I had to do is plug this into libTISCH
and the result: Multitouch with hacked Kinect.
The press also had some things to say about my hack:
