Kinect 2.0 - What's Possible?

If you're a nerd (which I'm guessing you are, being here) you wouldn't have escaped the Xbox One announcement a couple of days ago. Brand new console, brand new controller and, of course, a brand new Kinect sensor.

Right. A few numbers to kick us off. 1080p 60fps camera to capture you in the light, and a high-density IR sensor to capture you when there's not. You've got up to 6 skeletons to track now, each with more joints to track than ever before. It's got so much detail, it can detect your pulse based on your skin. That's madness, and wholly ridiculous, but I'm willing to believe it.

Despite looking pretty fugly, it's packing quite a lot of tech inside it. But what does that mean for amateurs like us, who just want to make a silly little game for it? Well, an official SDK and Windows hardware is coming, but just not with the release.

With up to 6 skeletons to track, it's going to get a whole more social. The only issue here I can see is getting 6 people in front of a screen without one blocking another, but I'm guessing it's gotten clever enough to cope with that without panicking like the current Kinect does.

In the case of the Xbox itself, it will recognise you and sign you in. In a recent demo of the new tech it followed you around as it recognised your face and body so knew just where you went, even if you leave the scene. Very, very useful in a situation where a lot of movement could be happening, like a dancing game for example.

While we got a vague taste of it in the recent updates to the Kinect SDK, we're seeing a real push for expression tracking in the new Kinect, by the looks of it. Due to the higher quality of depth (and speed), we can detect emotions with more reliability. Great for an advertising situation, or just something where we don't need actual motion controlling.

There's still a lot of questions to answer about the Xbox One and Kinect device, but a lot of time to answer them. The start looks promising, but it will be interesting to see what the devs get access to on the new iteration.