Future generations of the Kinect accessory for Xbox games consoles will feature incredible accuracy and a whole new design, new sources have confirmed to Eurogamer.
The gaming news website reports that Microsoft will be bundling the next motion sensing, voice controllable Kinect accessory with future Xbox consoles, of which there is rumoured to be two – Microsoft may be launching two very different consoles with the next Xbox, which could launch at the E3 gaming expo in 2013.
Eurogamer’s source also says that the second generation Kinect accessory will feature highly improved accuracy, tracking body movement as detailed as speech and lip movement. The source states that Kinect 2 could be so accurate that it can lip-read its users.
The source is one with a development background, so could potentially be working directly with Microsoft on the Kinect 2, or for a games developer hoping to create games for the new console and Kinect tech. The source spoke of the Kinect 2:
“It can be cabled straight through on any number of technologies that just take phenomenally high res data straight to the main processor and straight to the main RAM and ask, what do you want to do with it?”
The current Kinect is limited due to using a USB connection to the Xbox console, which means a lower rate of frames per second and a lower screen resolution. The source seems to think that both the next Xbox and Kinect 2 will put paid to this, resulting in more accurate user tracking.
Voice recognition will also be improved greatly on with Kinect 2, with the source claiming that the accessory will be able to detect the pitch and tone of a users voice, which coupled with the lip and facial feature tracking, would enable Kinect to calculate the mood of a gamer stood in front of it.
We’re big fans of Kinect for Xbox 360 at The Gadget Helpline, and can’t wait to see what Microsoft can do to improve the motion sensing and voice control aspects of the accessory.
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Source: Eurogamer