Its not everyday that a mainstream product becomes popular with a subculture like the Kinect is. I really think though that the most popular aspect about the Kinect will be the commercial applications though. As seen through the Roomba team and its new robot powered by two Kinects.

Onward and upwards and I hope the OpenKinect community keeps driving this forward!

There’s a VERY potentially gnarly downside to the deployment of Kinect’s in our homes. Don’t overlook that it’s a privacy risk with danger multipliers of night vision and the fact of how many Xbox consoles are WiFi connected. Passive Snooping has been given a new depth of risk where images of “us” are now going to be fewer keystrokes away than ever before.

So, we now have a situation where EVERY Kinect opens us up to snooping- by a night vision camera in places a camera should *NOT* be at all. And this reality has begun to be deployed by folks having no awareness of the risks. Call my comments an example of “Duty To Warn” in a very real sense. The jokes about “Tinfoil Hat” have been slowly becoming an Information Tech age replication of past situations where Crying WOLF! eventually became true too late. In this case? Tinfoil’s overkill, and a cardboard shoebox over the Kinect when it’s not in use might suffice to maintain privacy.

Frankly- I’m scared witless that we’ve not been strident enough about educating about how anything with a camera or audio pickup should be treated as always recording! Just as I was taught that a firearm is *never* treated as unloaded. There “used to be” mechanical sliders across some digital camera lenses-so there is existing precedent for what I’ve said. Be aware folks- please?

Also, fun fact, FAO Schwarz trains people to play on the piano. There are trained piano dancers.