As many of you may have already read, Xbox World Magazine are shutting down, but are going out with a bang.

They report to have knowledge of what could be the final specs of the next generation Xbox console.

Lets take at look at some of the rumoured features.

Horse Power:
According to the Durango dev Kits, we can expect the Next Generation Xbox (NGX) to have four physical cores, which may not sound great considering the current Xbox360 has three cores.
But the catch here, is that each of cores allegedly has four logical cores. This will mean a totally of 16 processor threads available to the system.
With what's possible in current generation DX11 PC's this means we can all look forward to some excellent AI and physics processing to be be built into the hardware.
Although currently developers aren't making great use of multi-core processors, hopefully this will be set to change in the near future.

Kinect 2.0
With all that extra processing power, it doesn’t seem like much to ask for the Kinect 2.0 system to borrow just a little bit of it. It's rumoured to be able to track 4 people simultaneously, including slight finger movements.
One of the aims is to use the Kinects depth sensing camera along with OmniTouch (a technology that allows any surface to be interact-able)to watch how people interact with surfaces. If this technology were to be coupled with a projector for example it would allow the NGX to project an image onto a surface and watch how you interact with it. A couple of suggestions for this tech would be a projected board game on a coffee table in front of you, or a virtual keyboard. Although these ideas are said to be small fry in comparison to what Microsoft have planned for the system.

Augmented Reality
Now take what you just read able projected images and replace that idea with AR Glasses, meaning that you could interact with any surface that you look at, sound interesting?
Another use for the AR Glasses is to project objects into your room. Turn your bedroom and those dirty socks into a race course? Possible
It would even be possible to project your in game HUD through your glasses. Making you feel like your actually Master Chief or even make you see Master Chief standing beside you.

3D Sound
Microsoft research department have already demonstrated this tech working as a prototype with an array of 16 speakers all working together by aiming sound within small environments. With such a setup connected to your Kinect sensor, the NGX could project audio that only you could hear, and change what you hear according to where you are and where your facing.

Blu-ray
“Finally!” I'm sure some of you are thinking. NGX may use Blu-Ray just like the PlayStation 3 has been doing all these years, but will avoid the problems that Sony have had with the standard (Namely poor seek times and painful loading times coupled with huge compulsory game installs). This will allow developers to store up to 50GB of data per Blu-Ray disc. Although plans already seem to be in place to drop the optical drive altogether in future iterations of the console to favour digital only downloads. Although with the state of the average broadband connection in the UK/Canada for example, it'll be a long time until many users can comfortably download a 30GB file without blowing their monthly data cap.

There are a lot more features planned, but we've mostly just covered the hardware ones here. Anybody who like to know the rest will have to purchase the January 2013 Issue of Xbox World

Posted: Nov 20, 2012 11:33 am
Related Forum: Gaming Discussion