Monday 18 June 2012

Xbox 720 leaks, Kinect 2 and Kinect Glasses also on the way



There was no Xbox 720 at E3 -- as we predicted -- but a 56 page document has just leaked detailing the console, as well as the successor to Kinect and a nifty glasses add-on known as Project Fortaleza.
The presentation dates from August 2010, The Verge reports, but considering it predicts such innovations as SmartGlass and a Metro dashboard, I've no reason not to assume these are on the money.
First up is the console. It's referenced as the Xbox 720 in the literature, and while it could be a working title, we'll take it as the name until we hear any different. The big news is it looks like it'll come packing Blu-ray functionality for showing 1080p HD movies, and it'll be able to play films in 3D. There should also be a huge jump in power -- six times as beefy as the current Xbox, according to the document. An 'always on' state should mean lightning start-up speeds too. Though the final specs aren't disclosed, with it possibly touting eight ARM or x86 cores, each clocked at 2GHz with 4GB of DDR4 memory, and three PPC cores each clocked at 3.2GHz for backwards compatibility with Xbox 360 games.
Thanks to a Windows 8 base it should let you record TV shows, and it should be easy for developers to make apps to work across it, PCs and mobiles too. The price is predicted as $299 (£190), and Microsoft expects it to stay around for a 10 year lifecycle, selling more than 100 million units.
Kinect 2 should be more accurate, have stereo imaging, better voice recognition, support for four player tracking, an improved camera, and dedicated hardware processing. Dedicated controllers (or 'props') are also expected, such as a bat for a baseball game. But does that miss the point of controller-free gaming?
And Project Fortaleza are a pair of specs that will work over Wi-Fi or 4G and add augmented reality to the mix. Google Project Glass for games, anyone? The glasses won't launch until 2014 though, but they are designed for use away from the console too, which is pretty exciting.
It all sounds pretty great to be honest. You can read the whole thing here. What are you most excited about? Let me know in the comments.

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