Kinect enthusiasts are just reaping the money hand-over-fist nowadays.

We've previously reported about the $2,000 bounty first offered by Adafruit Industries for Microsoft's Kinect. The challenge involved the creation of open-source drivers for the Xbox 360 add-on, which would allow people to theoretically connect the Kinect to non-Xbox products and reap even more benefits from the device's infrared-based motion-tracking. And that was the only catch: coders had to show a proof-of-concept that their open-source drivers successfully captured video and depth to win out.

Well, Google's own Matt Cutts has jumped into the bounty game with an offer of his own, promising two $1,000 rewards for, "the person or team that writes the coolest open-source app, demo, or program using the Kinect," as well as the person or team who does the best job of simplifying the process of writing Kinect-driven Linux applications.

"In my ideal world, would-be hackers would type a single command-line, e.g. 'sudo apt-get install openkinect' and after that command finishes, several tools for the Kinect would be installed," Cutts wrote in a blog post. "Maybe a 'Kinect snapshot' program that dumps a picture, a depth map, and the accelerometer values to a few files. Probably some sort of openkinect library plus header files so that people can write their own Kinect programs."

Would-be winners have until December 31 at midnight Pacific time to submit their proposals to Cutts via the comments section of his blog post. Cutts himself is selecting the winners, with potential help from GoogleBuddies.

As one might expect, Microsoft would still prefer that its Kinect owners isolate their play to Xbox-only activities.

"Kinect for Xbox 360 has not been hacked-in any way-as the software and hardware that are part of Kinect for Xbox 360 have not been modified," a Microsoft representative told GameSpot.

"What has happened is someone has created drivers that allow other devices to interface with the Kinect for Xbox 360," Microsoft continued. "The creation of these drivers, and the use of Kinect for Xbox 360 with other devices, is unsupported. We strongly encourage customers to use Kinect for Xbox 360 with their Xbox 360 to get the best experience possible."