The Battle Continues With Xbox 360

Each year, video game technologies increasingly resembles the fanciful ideas found in the Star Trek episode

. In 2006, Nintendo released the Wii, which was the very first home video game console based around motion sensitive controls and featured games that one could directly interact with utilizing physical movements, as opposed to strictly pressing buttons.

The Wii proved wildly popular, outselling its competitors, the PS3 and Xbox 360, and in December 2009, broke the record for best-selling console in the single month within the United States. It was so successful in reality, that the PS3 practically right away tried to implement some degree of motion sensitive control in its system, introducing the Six-axis controller. The Wii produced video games a a lot more physical activity than they had ever been perceived as and appealed to a wide demographic including folks who have been specifically non-gamers. It's easy, fun interactivity made it appealing to all kinds, not just hardcore gamers.

On November 4th, 2010, however, Microsoft intends to up the ante inside a huge way by releasing the Microsoft Kinect. The Xbox 360 Kinect is webcam style peripheral that detects motion, gestures, facial expressions, and voice commands, using this as the medium via which players interact with games. Whereas the Wii still utilized a controller whose presence and physical orientation were detected by the method, the Xbox Kinect requires no controller whatsoever. The gamer's physical self is detected using an RGB camera and depth sensor capable of three dimensional motion capture, to ensure that no controller is required to interact with the method. One's physical movements are read and interpreted directly by the game.

The Kinect is capable of simultaneously tracking up to six separate individuals, using a feature extraction of 20 joints or 48 skeletal points per player, and depending on their distance from the sensor bar, is able to interpret the movements of individual fingers. The sensor bar itself is seated atop a motorized pivot that can tilt 27 degrees up or down, and has an angular field of view of 57 degrees. Among the motion capture capabilities as well as the sensor bar's capability to physically orient itself, the system is even in a position to track and follow a moving person throughout applications such as video chat via Xbox Live or Windows Live Messenger.

Where the Wii was merely a glimpse into what home consoles were truly capable of, the Kinect firmly commits itself to that path and aims to revolutionize not only the way games are played, but what genuinely defines a game. So innovative is the technology in truth, that Microsoft intends for this to function almost as the release of an entirely new console, which doesn't seem unfair given that the Kinect will most definitely make the Xbox 360 function as new. Thus far, 16 launch titles have been announced, having a myriad much more no doubt on the way.

Between the Kinect, and similarly exciting systems in development for the Playstation 3 - additionally to whatever innovations 3rd party software developers are able to wring out of the technology - the future of gaming promises to be something truly out of science fiction.

by: Barry Burton

POST COMMENT

Three Reasons You Should Backup Your Xbox, Wii Or Ps2 Application Xbox 360 E70 Error - Find a Way to Fix it Today Xbox 360 E 74 Error - Take Care of it Today Xbox e74 Error Code - You Can Fix it Within 2 hours Super Cool Xbox 360 Case Xbox 360 download center from a Customer Review Free Xbox 360 With Mobile Phone- Enjoy The Great Dual Pack Xbox Kinect - A Recent Experience in Video Gaming Xbox Kinect - Experience the Innovative Era of Video Gaming Units Buy Cheap Xbox 360 Console Purchase the most preeminent Xbox 360 skins on the Web Xoxo Xbox 360 Accessories Good For Xbox 360 Wireless Controller