During his 2011 Consumer Electronics Show keynote address, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer made much of the Kinect, the Xbox 360's motion-sensing system. The camera-based, controller-free peripheral shipped 8 million units last year, 3 million more than the 5 million units Microsoft expected it to.
Speaking with the BBC, Ballmer appeared to confirm that a PC-compatible Kinect will indeed be released... eventually.
When asked "Will you be able to plug a Kinect into a PC?" by the interviewer, Ballmer answered: "We'll support that in a formal way in the right time, and when we have an announcement to make, we'll make it."
There are currently numerous open-source Windows drivers for the Kinect, leading to such experimental creations. Earlier this week Primesense, one of the companies behind Kinect technology, announced that it was working on a similar motion-sensing system for the PC. The system is being manufactured by PC maker Asus, has been named WAVI Xtion, and will be available in the second quarter of this year.