The new, somewhat larger — dare I say boxy -– Kinect is vastly more powerful than the one Microsoft had been selling for $99. During a post-Xbox One unveiling panel with Xbox’s Major Nelson (A.K.A. Larry Hryb), Todd Holmdahl, the corporate vice president of Xbox Hardware, outlined the sensor’s new capabilities:
While Microsoft raced through the Xbox One Kinect’s new features during the hour-long unveil, I got a chance to see the new Kinect controller in action and play with it a little bit (even if it was in a very controlled setting).Its field of view is now 60% better You can stand significantly closer to the sensor (up to four feet) It can read up to six skeletons at once, as opposed to two It works better than before in smaller rooms Small object detection is two-and-a-half times better It’s better at not only seeing faces, but also detecting expressions Active IR provides better low-light operation
It Sees All
As part of our tour of the Xbox Scientific Labs, Microsoft took us to a large room where they had set up a not-quite-finished Kinect for Xbox One. Its size and shape mimicked the one on stage earlier that day, but this one had a white chassis and some black tape on it. Clearly, though, the two had basically the same internals.
The new Kinect can also see under our clothes. No, it’s not scanning our bodies, but it can intuit skeletons and muscles. The new human-based physics model helps Kinect not only detect movement, but also tell which muscles are in use and which are relaxed. On screen, we saw these differences represented as red (stressed) and green (relaxed) muscles. With the added 3D capability, the sensor can also measure the force and momentum of your every move. In our demo, the amount of force was represented by larger circles (more force) and smaller circles (less force).
Having a Good Time?
But wait — there's more. Microsoft’s Xbox One Kinect controller isn’t simply measuring your position, action and pulse rate; it’s capturing your mood. By detecting nearly every detail of your face, the controller knows when you're smiling and when you're bored.SEE ALSO: Xbox One’s New Controller: Hands On
If a few people stand in front of the Xbox One Kinect, it measures each of their activities. During our demo, since the new Kinect wasn’t hooked up to a game, the controller produced a set of readouts that noted each person's facial expression, whether he was facing the controller, whether his mouth was open or closed, and whether he was speaking.
Kinect’s voice recognition is also more sophisticated. Microsoft demonstrated how the controller can now essentially extract commands in a noisy room. It can even tell who is delivering which commands. Without a game, though, this was hard to demonstrate.
In Full View
A new 1080p camera provides a widescreen view of the room without distorting it. This should be a boon for the Xbox One’s newly integrated Skype calling capabilities. Instead of demonstrating this for us, Microsoft showed a canned video of a typical Skype group call.
This highlighted a potential limitation of the new camera. While the demonstration showed most Skype participants sitting very close to the screen (possibly using a laptop or some other Skype-friendly device), realistically, most people using an Xbox are sitting at least 10 feet away from their HDTV screen and, likely, the new Kinect.
“Can you zoom?” someone asked. The answer was no. But Microsoft didn't rule it out for the future.
Despite this canned Skype demo, our Kinect demonstration proved that the earlier on-stage presentation wasn't simply a set of canned demos. There is real power inside the bigger, newer Kinect. I can't wait to see where developers go from here.
Image Courtesy of Microsoft Corp
Microsoft Unveils the Xbox One
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