The rumor mill for the next Xbox (let’s call it the Xbox 720) is going at full speed. We now have rumors it will play Blu-Ray, that it will come in the holiday season of 2013, that it will have a Radeon video card and that it will have smaller controller. But there are also some rumors about the next Kinect (let’s call it Kinect 2). and this one is pretty juicy!

Kinect 2

Some of you might know that Microsoft indicated why the resolution of Kinect is pretty low (for today’s standards). It’s because of the standard USB 2.0 connection that the Xbox has. That connection has a fixed maximum speed, and that speed is not high enough to send any more data from Kinect to the Xbox 360.

With the next Xbox we all thought this would be solved by simply implementing a USB 3.0 connection, which offers much faster speeds. But according to this latest rumor Microsoft is not doing that, they are doing something better: They are giving Kinect an on-board processor!

Kinect on-board processor

So what does it mean if Kinect will get an on-board processor? Well for starters the data connection doesn’t have to be super fast because Kinect will process all the raw video data itself and only send the result of all that data to the Xbox. But what’s even better is that using Kinect integration will not use valuable processing power of the Xbox. This means that developers don’t have to give up on game performance when implementing Kinect anymore! This opens up a lot of possibilities and makes integrating Kinect a lot easier.

Let’s hope that this rumor is true, because it is a huge one!

Source: kotaku