Problem

I wanted to use a Primesense RD1.09 depth camera on my Ubuntu computer. I installed the OpenNI packages available in Ubuntu as described here. I plugged in the camera to a USB 2.0 port and tried the default OpenNI viewer and got this error:

$ Sample-NiSimpleViewer 
Open failed: Failed to set USB interface!

Solution

The camera seemed to be detected since it appears in lsusb listing. The solutions provided online did not work. In the end, I removed the installed OpenNI packages and installed the latest OpenNI2 package as described here. This worked! 🙂

Tried with: Primesense RD1.09 and Ubuntu 14.04