DCEmu Homebrew, Hacking, Emulation, Gaming and Theme Park News. - Xbox World investigates: The 14 game-changing features of Xbox 720

Way back in January, Xbox World revealed everything its sources had to say about the next Xbox, from CPU specs to details on the bizarre augmented reality glasses you'll likely be using in late 2014. Six months later, a leaked Microsoft document confirmed it all.
It's fair to say Xbox World has been at the cutting edge of Durango coverage for over 12 months, and now, ahead of its final issue, their huge "everything we know" feature does its best to expose Microsoft's next-gen console plans.
The final issue of Xbox World goes on sale Wednesday, December 12. You can still buy issues of Xbox World online or via Apple Newsstand here (UK) or here (US).

THE 14 GAME-CHANGING FEATURES OF XBOX 720

Words: Xbox World issue 125, November 2012

Microsoft never "comment on rumour or speculation", so we turned to a panel of industry experts and asked them about the most hotly rumoured features of the next Xbox - Kinect 2.0, Blu-ray, a quad-core CPU, 8Gb of RAM, directional audio, a TV output and input, the customisable controller and those incredible AR specs.
Don't expect the next Xbox to be called Xbox 3 or Xbox 720. Apple has changed the rules on branding, so when the next generation arrives it'll almost certainly just be 'Xbox'. That part is speculation, but everything else you're about to read has come from industry experts and from Microsoft's own leaky boat.
The next Xbox will hit shelves in November 2013 and the best developers in the world are already working on it. Rare has Kinect Sports 3, Bungie has Destiny, Lionhead has the long-rumoured Fable MMO, 343 has Halo 5, DICE has Battlefield 4, and Turn 10 has Forza 5, and you won't have to wait long to see them.
Unless something really dramatic changes, everything you see here will be revealed long before June's E3 conference, at Microsoft's annual 'X' showcase in February or March next year. The next-generation countdown starts now...

MASSIVE POWER

Microsoft's 'Durango' development kits are already in developers' hands, and the CPU at the heart of the machine is a monster. Where 360 has a three-core CPU from 2005, Durango promises four hardware cores, each divided into four logical cores - a spec greater than anything even the most hardcore PC gamer has on his desktop.
"On paper the 360's specs are still fairly respectable," says Matt Ployhar, senior product planner on Nvidia's Consumer Applications Product Team. "It has three cores clocked roughly at 3.2Ghz each, and the newer 360s have a 45nm chip using less power. However, it's not until you really start digging that the bigger advancements that have been made in CPU architectures start becoming more apparent.

Xbox World's mock-up of what it expects the next-gen Xbox to look like. "The future will be black, sharp and curved.""Today, a 'next-gen' console would likely want to use the latest and greatest architecture it could in order to sustain itself over another five to ten year time frame."Specifications-wise, we'd end up with a 22-28nm chip, another processing core at roughly the same clock speeds, a cache that is not only faster but four times bigger, six times the number of transistors; all while keeping in the same ballpark or better for power constraints. That's not too shabby, and it doesn't even begin to cover the fact graphics can occupy space on that same physical die and easily match current-generation graphics performance."

PUTTING THE POWER TO WORK

So you've got all this extra power... what can you do with it? "We can simulate more things and simulate those things better," says Simon Mack, chief tech man at Naturalmotion - the Cambridge-based studio behind GTAIV's physics.
"You get more physics, you get better fidelity. We can expect to see more simulated characters and richer worlds. We can start to look at having more complex characters under simulation with more complex interactions, and can add more things - hair and cloth and that sort of thing. This all helps to increase believability.

"Right now, game environments are generally restricted to straightforward simulated objects. Having a greater level of physical simulation means you can have more detailed interaction with it. At its most basic, how about destruction? Destruction of objects, of cloth, and soon... That means your character can affect the world in a more detailed and interesting way, as well as have the world affect the character.
"As you up the number of possible interactions in the game, it becomes harder to manage the gameplay. That's the challenge many developers will face, but we think that will benefit gameplay in coming years."

KINECT 2.0

Kinect 2.0 tracks up to four players and can read even the smallest movements of your fingers thanks to advancements in the camera technology and the additional processing grunt, rumours suggest, but there are other Microsoft technologies which will feed into the next generation of Microsoft's often dubious motion sensor.
"For the last couple of years we have explored how to use depth-sensing cameras to enable interactions on surfaces in the environment," says Microsoft researcher Hrvoje Benko.
His device, Omnitouch, turns any surface into an interactive touch screen using a projector or - potentially - augmented reality specs. "Coupled with a pico projector, one can turn anything into an interactive surface. It's possible to track fingers in mid-air and reason about their collisions with other objects, thus simulating the multi-touch interactions from smartphones and slates."
Coupled with a miniature projector and Benko's tech, the next Xbox could project a board game right onto your coffee table or give you a virtual keyboard at any time. But even that's thinking small compared to what Microsoft has in mind...

http://www.computerandvideogames.com...the-next-xbox/