I hope this isn't too far off topic, but if the driver gurus out there
do some work on either the openni or freenect versions, it would be
awesome to get some audio support for the Kinect's microphones (ditto
for the Xtion if possible).  This thread on ros-kinect
<http://kinect-with-ros.976505.n3.nabble.com/Ros-kinect-kinect-audio-td3171434.html>
seems to suggest that audio support is still in a state of flux.  I can
think of three aspects of driver support (not having a clue how to write
a driver myself) that would be nice to have in ROS:

* basic audio (used as a regular audio input source)
* noise canceling (not sure if that takes place in the firmware or driver)
* sound localization

--patrick