The original Kinect Sports titles were some of the best selling Kinect games on the Xbox 360. Now Microsoft and Rare are bringing it back on the Xbox One with a ton of new features enabled by the newly improved Kinect.
In a new video from Microsoft, the folks at Rare talk about their work on the new Kinect in Kinect Sports Rivals. The legendary studio reveals that they can use the high definition camera in the new Kinect to create an almost picture perfect stylized recreation of a player’s face in the title. That version of you is then uploaded to the cloud and added into other player’s games.
The developers also reveal that they can now accurately track subtle movements so it’s possible to play more realistic versions of games like tennis and bowling. One example is that the camera can detect slight variations in the wrist so players will be able to put just the right amount of spin on a bowling ball.
So, how is this supposed to sell the core on Kinect? After all, Kinect Sports Rivals just looks like an upgraded version of the original Kinect Sports. That may be true, but the new facial scanning features should have everybody excited. For the first time, players may finally be able to actually play as a character that actually looks like them instead of the crude recreations we get in Miis and Xbox Live avatars.
Kinect Sports Rivals will be released exclusively on the Xbox One in 2014.