Johnny Chung Lee, the founding father of the Open Kinect community, recently spoke at the Wired Business Conference on how the community has grown. Dave Mosher has a post on the subject, and he describes some of the more impressive hacks:

The variety is astounding. Enthusiasts have tailored the software to control digital puppets, make themselves invisible and even control robots. Engineers at the University of California at Berkeley recently created an autonomous flying robot that can, using the hacked software, scan and map an entire house.
Seeing what their gaming product was capable of, Microsoft’s heart has warmed to the idea of opening up Kinect. The company is not only gearing up to release a basic, enthusiast-level development kit this spring (which will bring audio recognition and other capabilities), but also sell a more robust build for commercial developers.
The most surprising thing of all about the history of the crowd-sourced Kinect, said Lee, is that all hacks were done more in the past five months — an incredibly rapid turnaround for any software or engineering effort.

I’m very enthusiastic about the potential of the Kinect as a bridge to true ubicomp.