Any suggestion where I can get a solid overview of what it takes to hack the Kinect on non-Windows machines? Forums haven't cut it for me, and I don't want to go out and buy a Kinect if the language/toolkit isn't great.
There's a lot of really great support in the robotics community. ROS, Robot OS, works great in ubuntu and makes it really easy to get data out of the kinect.
The easiest way to get into it is probably to use a creative coding framework (either Open Frameworks or Cinder.) They both have modules that wrap OpenNI and run on Windows and Mac OS X. Many of the more interesting Kinect hacks have been made with creative coding frameworks.
