So right now I have both consoles preordered. There are obvious reasons to love both, but when I think of which one has the potential to feel the most futuristic in my home, I'm always thinking about the Xbox One, Kinect 2, and it's IR blaster.

Currently I use the first Kinect in a limited way but mainly because it's not very heavily integrated into the various apps that support it. Controlling Netflix is awesome; being able to say pause, play, choose titles, and yet search can only be done spelling out words using a controller. But in the areas where it does work, I think it's amazing. Always accurate and doesn't require me to yell at it to recognize me. Best of all, now that I have a daughter, I have been using voice commands prolifically. Most of the time my arms are full or I'm feeding her and didn't remember to grab the remote. Being able to spit commands to the system and have it do things effortlessly feels like the future, and if you're telling me Kinect 2 is even more accurate, more heavily integrated into the system, and can now control my TV, receiver, and whatnot; that just blows my mind.

I feel like if Microsoft spent more time highlighting this feature, more people would get on board with Kinect 2. Or am I the only one that's excited about this. Think of it; what if they opened the api and allowed an app where you could also control home automated lighting. You could say "Kinect on" and have it turn on the console, the tv, surround sound, and dim the lights to something you specified. That sounds so remarkable to me I can't imagine people not finding that extremely cool.

There's clear potential. I'll just have to see it realized a bit before I get very excited.

Agree with truth tellah. I was a microsoft nut but i have had very bad expierences with kinect. Please no more hulk hogans main event. Please.

I'm excited. I'll vote you for president. And I do like Kinect.

I'm pretty sure no one cares about this stuff. People take the "Ignorance is Bliss," route, rather than accepting the future. Like you know: "We could just have an Android app for everything, instead of actually having an alll in one system with a microphone and camera, people would rather just poke an app that probably won't work nor be compatible in two years."

Seriously! Its amazing how much people don't care about Kinect. All people care about is games, rather than lifestyle convenience, and taking the rest of your life into consideration in the next 10 years. Just games.

Granted, I'm mostly excited to use voice to control my home entertainment setup, but even some of the stuff they are incorporating into the games sound exciting. Like in Dead Rising where the zombies can hear ambient noise coming from your living room and respond to it. Try to sneak past zombies, someone sneezes, and shit all the zombies are alerted. That sounds exciting and immersive to me.

@tastybread: I really hope you can turn that stuff off without having to turn the kinect off, it can get pretty noisy where I play games.

I don't know who Jarvis is, but Kinect's going to be awesome. It's the most exciting thing for me this gen and I hope devs put it to good use. It's amazing technology and I'm seriously disappointed with the lack of vision on the part of most game developers and the original Kinect. They stunk it up and appeared creatively bankrupt. Other than mainly Harmonix and Rare who really put it to good use and at least have figured out how to make some fun games with it, the rest were just shamelessly trying to cash in on that casual market. It took until now and Ryse to figure out you can use its voice recognition capabilities to command friendly AIs? Seriously? That was one of the things I immediately thought of when they first unveiled it. Is it so hard to see it's perfect for story-telling, horror games, and more passive cinematic experiences? D2 better be using it. Same for Quantum Break. Even JRPGs would be a bliss with this thing since now you could actually use voice recognition and gestures to control other party members and be able to do an action rpg while maintaining the party system in a battle.

Which is why I'm thrilled Kinect is standard. I expect new gaming experiences that play and feel very different thanks to Kinect this gen. And if the current dev houses have gotten so used to the cycles of churning out the same rehash me-too titles, and don't want to take risks, then Kinect is a great opportunity for new devs to make a name for themselves this gen and actually deliver some amazing, immersive experiences with it. Out with the old, in with the new.

But yeah, even outside games, Kinect is looking awesome. Can't wait to mess with all the features. And don't worry, MS will highlight it. It will sell Xbox Ones. They're advertising isn't going to kick in for a month before launch. Companies don't really spend time or money on marketing features to hardcore gamers. Would be a total waste. Just wait until people see how easy it is to talk to it and combine all the features like Skype video calls and gesture menu navigation....if it's as intuitive and reponsive as what they've demo-ed that's what will sell the box to your casual Joe. It's just plain cool and a big wow factor. And you can count me as part of that crowd too. It's a wow factor to me as well.

Found out it can turn on my TV when i say xbox on. Pretty cool, but will i have Kinect plugged in?

Welcome to the mid 1980s.

Seriously though, Sony has already confirmed that the PS Eye will also do motion gestures, facial recognition, take your picture, support video chat, and allow you to use voice commands. It will also be an optional 60 dollars, rather than a mandatory 100 dollars.

Sony will support it through software, because they want to sell the optional hardware. 3rd party developers will support it, because they'll already be making an Xbox One version that supports optional motion gestures and voice commands, and it will be easy enough just to copy those gameplay elements over to the PS Eye.

Will the technology of the PS Eye be as impressive as Kinect in Xbox One? No. Will it still work with the vast majority of uses that you refer to in your original post? Yes.

Microsoft could easily still blow the doors off of Sony in this area, but they're going to need several games that really show people the advantages of Kinect over the PS Eye. The fact that they won't even have one such title ready at launch doesn't inspire my confidence.

Motion gaming is like voice recognition, if it isn't 100% accurate 99% of the time then it's a complete failure. That stuff takes data, lots and lots of data. It's a reason Google is the best at it but still isn't perfect at it, there's just SO much nuance to voice recognition to be viable for most people. I've always been good with voice recognition stuffs, but even in the best of times I'm still forced to recite commands rather than just talk to a device like a human, it gets caught up and confused if I take a second between one word or another as I think... I need to prepare and think of a clear sentence to feed it... it's tedious and not worth the time investment.

Motion controls are the same, just in a very early stage comparatively and it seems like it would be even harder to get better over time because at least with google it's basically the largest entity to collect the data required to get voice better, where as microsoft isn't exactly raking in the motion control data hand over fist from somewhere, if anywhere really.

better is good, but better isn't perfect and it has to be perfect to be viable and truly interesting. Until it's perfect it's just a gimmick that you use either just a few times or only for a select few operations you know work most of the time (like on the 360, saying XBOX PAUSE and such... worked MOST of the time, more than anything else)

@spaceinsomniac: Right, because a clapper is the same as dimming lights at a single command that is simultaneously activating a console, turning on a tv to the correct input, and turning on your surround sound. And the PSeye will do all these exact same things even though it doesn't have an IR blaster and the voice command function rumor is something that was mentioned once and has never been reproduced by any hardware sony has released or demoed in the past. So yeah, you obviously have done a great job of ignoring the point what I think is unique about the kinect 2.

Nothing about using Netflix with voice is awesome. I'll use my media remote any day over voice controls, even for typing and choosing films. It's better to put in one letter at a time because of the way Netflix shows film names & suggestions as you type them, at least it does on the PS3.

and we still don't know if the Netflix app will be terrible or not on the XBONE, they certainly butchered the 360 one. I stopped using my 360 for Netflix long ago.

It should be better. With the 360 MS designed the apps that worked on the console. Now they've opened it up to developers so it could be great because Nerflix themselves will code it. But man, I love Kinect controlling netflix. I can be in another room and tell it pause. Helps to have hardwood floors.