In order to celebrate 25 years of Mario, a gamer who calls himself Yankeyan posted a video titled "Kinect as a Nintendo controller on the PC." In it, he shows himself playing the original Super Mario Bros. game using Microsoft's Kinect motion controller. He used drivers from OpenKinect and FCEUX's NES emulation to create the proof of concept.
"I programmed it to recognize my motions and passed the virtual button presses to the NES emulator," reads the video's description. "I could have placed a simulated keypad right in front of me that I can press with my hands, but I thought full body gestures were more in the spirit of Kinect. Of course, Mario isn't designed to be played like this, so this is really really hard."
We also have a second video for you that really shows one avenue developers could take with Kinect hacking. Oliver Kreylos has managed to connect two Kinects together and calibrate them in a way to combine their two data streams into one continual video of a particular object. His work shows that it could one day be possible to combine multiple Kinects to have a truly 360 degree experience.
"First test of merging the 3D video streams from two Kinect cameras into a single 3D reconstruction," reads the video's description. "The cameras were placed at an angle of about 90 degrees, aimed at the same spot in 3D space. The two cameras were calibrated internally using the method described in the previous video, and were calibrated externally (with respect to each other) using a flat checkerboard calibration pattern and manual measurements."