kinect

Kinect PlayFit counts your calories as you play Kinect games

Xbox Kinect users can now see how many calories they're actually shedding as they jump, dance, and shake to their favorite games.

Available today as a free download for Xbox Live subscribers, Kinect PlayFit is a fitness dashboard that counts the calories you burn as you play certain Kinect games, including Dance Central 2, Your Shape Fitness Evolved 2012, and even Kinect Star Wars.

You can also follow your calorie count over time to see how much you're losing as you do the Zumba or swing that lightsaber.

You can even get credit depending on how many calories … Read more

Turns out Kinect is for fashionistas and surgeons, too

REDMOND, Wash. -- Anyone who's ever tried on a pair of pants, a blouse, or a skirt can testify to the challenge of finding the right size. Medium doesn't always mean the same thing to every company.

"The industry is designing for an ideal body shape that is not us," says Raj Sareen, chief executive and founder of Styku, a Los Angeles-based company that's using Microsoft's Kinect motion-sensing video game controller to solve the problem.

The 1-year-old, nine-employee company has developed a product that uses Kinect to scan a body in three seconds to … Read more

Rumor Has It: Is the Kindle Fire 2 really dropping next month? (video)

Our big rumor of the week is directly related to Google, so thankfully Karyne made it back in town just in time to witness the Google Glass-wearing skydivers jump from a dirigible into Google I/O. Wait, what? Whoa!

Before the keynote went off on a crazed adventure sports tangent, Google announced a new product: the new Nexus 7 tablet running Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and selling for the small sum of $199. What else sells for that? Oh right, the Kindle Fire.

So this leads us to the question: is Amazon now feeling the pressure to update its … Read more

Kinect in the car? It's coming

Microsoft placed a want ad for a software engineer with its Connected Car QA team to aid in the development and testing of the next-generation connected car platform. Based on the job description on Microsoft's Web site, it looks like the technology giant has embedded every product it offers in the dash:

For the next generation of the Connected Car Platform, we plan to leverage the full power of the Microsoft ecosystem including Kinect, Windows 8, Windows Phone, Windows Live, Bing, Azure, and Tellme. The combination of rich local sensing, user identification, cloud access, and data mining will transform … Read more

Next Xbox could have glasses, new Kinect

Today we're shooting cowboys in the living room and bringing game shows to our tablets:

A leaked PDF document hints at what Microsoft could have in store for the next version of Xbox. If the 56-page document is true, the Xbox 720 has a planned release for 2013 and will play Blu-ray movies, 3D videos and it would work with special glasses for augmented reality gaming. The document also suggests the next version of the Kinect will track four people at once, have improved voice recognition and it could be split into two units on both sides of the … Read more

The 404 1,076: Where you don't know you're beautiful (podcast)

Hope you're sitting down for this: Jeff actually has positive words about a movie he saw this weekend! Without giving away the surprise, suffice it to say that Jeff's complaints about the lack of creativity in film and his disgust with the movie-going experience disappeared for two hours on Friday.

In advance of Microsoft's mysterious press event today, we'll speculate what's in store for the software giant and how it could fit into the 56-page road map document that leaked over the weekend.… Read more

'Kinect Glasses' coming from Microsoft?

If a supposedly leaked, 56-page Microsoft document is the real deal, we've now got more details on the Xbox 720, as well as on the next version of Kinect. We've also got an intriguing glimpse of a Google glasses-like project called Project Fortaleza.

Our sister site CNET UK has a report on the document, which was written about by The Verge earlier today. Among other things, the document says the 720 console will feature Blu-ray functionality for showing high-def movies and will be able to play films in 3D. Check out the CNET UK story here.

Kinect wants to come to your emotional rescue

You know the future isn't going to be all that, don't you?

There might, though, be certain things that will uplift you beyond measure. I now wish to live at least another 50 years, so that I can experience the new potential of Microsoft's Kinect.

For sometime in the future, Kinect is going to start knowing exactly how I'm feeling. Indeed, Microsoft has filed a patent application that promises this during Kinect play: "Online activities for users are obtained and processed to assign emotional states to the users."

Kinect is going to care. Kinect … Read more

The 404 1,071: Where we say goodbye to Hollywood (podcast)

We'll wait until tomorrow to go over all the Apple announcements from WWDC, so today's show is all about Jeff's return to the East Coast and his E3 wrap-up. Jeff and Scott Stein agree that the show lacked the hardware announcements everyone expected, with Nintendo playing serious catch-up with the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Jeff and I then envision a potential future without E3 or maybe even a move to New York, where my co-host wouldn't be forced to play next-gen hockey games as the LA Kings.

Moving on, we'll talk about Microsoft registering … Read more