Hi Piyush,
This is an idea I've been considering for a while, for the same reasons
you already outlined. Do you have any information on Asus Xtion Pro Live
support? As far as I know:
* the OpenNI drivers supports the Asus directly (albeit not very
robustly, depending on the Ubuntu version).
* the master branch of freenect does not support the Asus
* there exists a version of the freenect driver modified for the Asus [1]
I would be willing to contribute time for a stable driver which works
seamlessly with both the Kinect and Asus hardware.
Cheers,
Ivan
[1]
https://github.com/zarvox/libfreenect/tree/xtion