Xbox One Kinect Sports Rivals preview At a behind closed doors briefing earlier in the year I was lucky enough to glimpse a little of this future. A combination double-blow of the Xbox One's computational agility and the Kinect's new HD perception defied anyone to not leave the room smiling. The candour around Kinect was discernibly different too. Gone was the firewall between talk of Kinect and core gaming. In fact a tech demo pitched us into first person shooter mode, sat on the couch with a controller. No change there, until at the tap of a head a radar was raised or a gentle lean to the left edged us out of cover. It was (I hope) a glimpse of what is to come, and one as telling from the more robust rhetoric around the technology as the admittedly impressive prowess of the demo itself. Back on the show floor, in the public gaze, was found the first green shoots of this new Kinect experience. Kinect Sports Rivals may again suffer from the kiddie-perception of previous titles, however it's anything but. What takes it from novelty sports game to super competitive core-experience is the night and day improvement of the fidelity of Kinect. Along with talk around the form of each new sport in Kinect Sports Rivals was an excitement about many problems from the first iteration of hands-free controller that simply go away with Kinect 2.0. Its new ability to distinguish one player from another, to accommodate more people in the play space without becoming confused along with its wider field of view make this feel like a new experience. For families this will make a big difference. As Adam Park, producer on Kinect Sports Rivals, underlined "in the past where children lost tracking because of adults in the room, you won't have any of that now. If there's lots of kids running around and one of them is trying to play it won't assume that the others are trying to play as well. Kinect Sports Rivals offers a combination of Tennis, Bowling and Football returning from the previous game, with improved tracking and controls. These are complemented with three new sports, Wake Racing, Target Shooting and Rock Climbing. Playing Wake Racing and Rock Climbing was impressive, both in terms of the fidelity of controls (being able to control throttle by opening and closing your hands) but also the game's ability to not get confused about who was stood in front of it. Filming a Kinect game on the 360 would be tricky as the controller would look at the tripod and cameraman and think they were playing. On the Xbox One Kinect this hasn't once been a problem at all. But it wasn't until I started to pack up, that Park suggested we sneak a look at the game's debug screens to "see" what Kinect is looking at in the space. Here I started to understand why this new Kinect is such a different experience. As he cycled through all sorts of different views of the player created from both the visual and infra-red feed, I ask what the different coloured balls on my hands signified. "Oh, that's whether they are opened or closed" was his response. The next few minutes was then spent moving limbs, hands and torso around in front of Kinect oohing and ahhing over its ability to track even the most contorted of movements all the while ignoring the bodies milling past behind us. Then I notice a word next to my stick figure's head: "Normal." Upon asking what it meant I discovered it's not a measure of my stature but my mood. That's Kinect seeing if you are smiling or not. About to decry what must surely be impossible I inadvertently smiled and saw on screen the readout change to "Happy." It was one of those moments when technology not only surprises you but all sorts of Blade Runner like uses for it instantly spring to mind. My only reference point for the feeling was when I first hit a tennis ball with a Wii Remote. It seems pedestrian now, but at the time it was like visiting another world. It brought to mind Jenova Chen sharing his excitement with me about Kinect's ability to "capture players facial expressions and gestures and fingers so that they could actually go into a virtual world and see their emotions, it seems that Kinect is finally there." The thought of a Kinect game from ThatGameCompany was an exciting prospect, should it become a reality -- and a packed in Kinect made that reality more likely. It may be easy to take Park's enthusiasm for the new controller with a pinch of salt, after all he works at Microsoft owned Rare, but actually he is saying very similar things to Chen. Right now many people will be unsure why they have to have Kinect with their Xbox One, but as time goes by I think it's going to look like one of the best decisions Microsoft made in this new generation of consoles. If I'm wrong I'll eat my Kinectimals.