We already know that if a couple of overly restrictive NDAs hadn’t gotten in the way, Apple could have ended up owning the technology behind Microsoft’s new motion-control accessory for the Xbox 360 game console, but if you’ve already bought a Kinect and would like to see what a Mac with Kinect-like abilities could have been like, the hacker community’s already starting to put the software together, starting with hacker Theo Watson getting the Kinect’s cameras to output under OS X.
It’s not the whole Kinect shebang yet, but it’s a start. The more I think about the Kinect and how Apple, the more I wonder if motion and voice control isn’t the inevitable solution to Apple’s claims that multitouch just doesn’t really work on a non-horizontal surface. Steve Jobs’ argument about the unpleasant ergonomics of having to constantly hold a “gorilla arm” out to touch and prod your multitouch desktop display is a lot less convincing when a shrug, gesture or spoken command can be used to do the same thing instead.