IndustryGamers - Informing the Games Industry

Xbox 360's Kinect to Support Only 2 Players at a Time?

Posted June 29, 2010 by Ben Strauss

The new Kinect is supposed to be fun for the whole family. Demos shown during E3 showed off ‘families’ of four enjoying a rousing time together on the Kinect device. It would seem that something might be amiss with the new tech specs released.

It seems Microsoft has not been completely forthright about the amount of users that the Kinect can handle at a time, but demos and promotional material hinted at families of four being able to use the device at any given time. We've pinged Microsoft for comment and will update this story once we've heard back. [Update: Here's Microsoft's reply to us, "We've announced that Kinect will support multiplayer, but have not specified how many players at one time."]

Play.com has listed the full technical specifications of Microsoft’s Kinect, as provided by Microsoft. 

The system does detail that the device can in fact track up to 6 players at a time, but only two of those players are “active” at any given time. This “active” status is also used to describe the 20-point ‘skeleton’ tracking system used to map players to games and the Live avatars.

What this potentially details is that only two players can use the Kinect at any given time for full-body games.

The full spec sheet as listed:

Sensor
Colour and depth-sensing lenses
Voice microphone array
Tilt motor for sensor adjustment
Fully compatible with existing Xbox 360 consoles
Field of View
Horizontal field of view: 57 degrees
Vertical field of view: 43 degrees
Physical tilt range: ± 27 degrees
Depth sensor range: 1.2m - 3.5m
Data Streams
320x240 16-bit depth @ 30 frames/sec
640x480 32-bit colour@ 30 frames/sec
16-bit audio @ 16 kHz
Skeletal Tracking System
Tracks up to 6 people, including 2 active players
Tracks 20 joints per active player
Ability to map active players to Live Avatars
Audio System
Live party chat and in-game voice chat (requires Xbox Live Gold Membership)
Echo cancellation system enhances voice input
Speech recognition in multiple

Ben is a recent graduate of Xavier University.  You can see him ramble on about gaming, gamification, military-related gaming and manly things on his Twitter @Sinner101GR.