This gets the nerdy-engineer side of me all hot 'n bothered.
It'd be interesting to mount this on a rotating scanner with good lighting(lights mounted on the side of the kinect?), so you could place an object inside and have it generate a fully textured 3d model. If you made the lighting rotate separately, it could be possible to general accurate normal maps too. Compare the image with the light hitting at, say, 60* to straight on, should give a good idea of where the high and low spots are, and how high/low they are. It would take some programming knowledge(which I do not possess), but it would certainly be really cool. Spec maps would be possible too by the same process.
Hmm, maybe when I can get my hands on one of them when they're more like $100 I'll play around with this.
I wonder if you could turn the Kinect into an affordable way to generate mocaps for character animations.
Quote from JetsetlemmingI wonder if you could turn the Kinect into an affordable way to generate mocaps for character animations.
omg that would rock !!! and from what i have seen so far it should be absolutly possible too !
Nope. Not without heavy engineering. Kinect gets volumes while mocap creates skeletons. Obviously you could try to write a script that will create a volume around a skeleton and tries to match the bones then to match the Kinect-Volume... Damn, now i'm startled to do something like this :X
you're... scared of doing it or you want to do it? either way, i fucking love these people that randomly buy shit just to hack it. go linux nerds!
Haha, sweet. Although couldn't you have done this at any point in the last 10+ years by just hooking two webcams into your computer and writing the appropriate drivers and/or software? 
Ordinary cameras don't have this:
Well I think just about any regular camera can do that, and apparently most webcams can too — it's just the manufacturers put filters in to stop it by default. 
All you'd need is a regular cam and a second cam set to IR mode, carefully configured to look at the same thing. That's literally all the Kinect is, except packed into a single unit (and extremely expensive tbh, but with the 360 that's OK because you're paying for Microsoft's software which allows for body recognition, etc).
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