Kinect 2 to be Able to Read Lips and Emotions
Since the release of the Kinect for the Xbox 360 many gamers and hackers have enjoyed the motion sensing peripheral Microsoft has made. After a year of having been released, there is already talks about a successor and just how powerful it will be. According to EuroGamer, it's going to be so powerful it can read lips.
It will also be bundled with the next Xbox Microsoft creates and offer improved motion sensing and and voice recognition. Aside from reading lips it will also be able to track the pitch and volume of the player's voice along with facial expressions to differentiate the player's emotions when gaming.
What is holding the current Kinect back is its USB connection to the Xbox 360. When using a USB connection, the interface is capable of transmitting 35 MB/s however, there is a cap on it that makes it only use 15/16 MB/s due to the possibility of having other USB devices connected as well. Because of these limits the depth sensor is only able to transmit at 30 frames per second and at a 320 x 240 resolution.
The Kinect 2 will not work under these constraints since it will be built-in with the next Xbox, meaning it can feed the next Xbox high resolution data directly to its processor and RAM.
What will be interesting to see is if Microsoft plans to launch two different versions of the next Xbox (one being barebones and the other premium) what exactly would that entail? Would that mean one will have the Kinect 2 and one will not? Will there be huge hard-drive differences as well? What will the price difference be? These are all questions that need to be answered for us gamers before we can even consider thinking about buying this successor.
Another problem that is still posed from the original Kinect is the amount of space required to work. Although it has been reduced by 40% with the Nyko Zoom peripheral, one can only help but wonder if the Kinect 2 will use the same amount of space or improve upon the original in that regard.
However, no one can deny what the Kinect brought to the masses. Full-body motion gaming. It excelled in games that required this like Dance Central and Kinect Sports. And much like every single generation, software drives the hardware, not the other way around. It got gamers off their feet and busting out dance moves that can be applied in real life situations (such as clubs for instance, which I still haven't been to one). It also got us exercising with UFC Personal Trainer, which is probably the most brutal work-out game to have ever existed. But most importantly, it advanced the idea of motion gaming from fad to embedding itself into the gaming world.
Source: Eurogamer
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