Kinect 3D Viewer brings Kinect to the Mac, we go hands-on

Microsoft Kinect continues to find itself popping up in a variety of places that isn’t the company’s Xbox 360, and the latest one is the Apple Mac.

Thanks to a free app in the new Apple Mac App Store, Kinect Apple Mac users can now see what they look like on OSX, if they are happy to unplug the gaming accessory from their games console.

Called Kinect 3D Viewer, the app lets you plug in your Kinect into your computer and view a 3D visualization of the depth data the accessory is capturing.

To be fair that’s all it does, but it does open up the possibility of Mac users being able to use the Microsoft device for other applications in the future.

You can also map RGB values onto the depth image, as well as rotate the visualization and zoom in.

A quick plug in of our Kinect in the office to our MacBook Pro, a download later, and we are pleased to report it does work, although it's worth pointing out again that the app is incredibly basic. It's more of a proof of concept.

Still, it will give you 5 minutes of fun, won’t cost you a penny extra, and allow you to think about the possibilities of where this technology is all going.

The developer, Laan Consulting Corp, says in the Mac App Store blurb that the Kinect Viewer is based on the “hard work of the people from OpenKinect”, however isn’t affiliated with the OpenKinect group.

Either way, if you've got both you'll find it pretty cool.