New Xbox One UI demo released by Microsoft

Microsoft has released a new live demo of the Xbox One user interface. The demo is hosted inside Microsoft’s testing studio and features Corporate Vice President for Xbox division Marc Whitten and Chief Marketing & Strategy Officer for Xbox division Yusuf Medhi.

The demo is off-screen and direct feed footage, a first because most of the previous UI demos were mock-ups of work that was ongoing inside the Xbox division. The software you’ll see in the demo is indicative of the shipping software all Xbox One consoles will come with once the offline patch has been installed.

Some interesting new features that haven’t been touted before are shown in the video. Although Kinect can recognise players using photo recognition to sign them in to Xbox Live on any console with an internet connection, it also enables fast switching between users on the console by listening for the word “Xbox” and then identifying which player is speaking with the command, “show my stuff.”

Xbox One Upload Studio

Whitten does a very brief demo of the video uploader using Forza Motorsport 5 as an example and it appears to work quite well – there are several templates for filters and video borders, an option to insert video with voiceover to your clip, and options for tagging, sharing the video to social networks and uploading it to the Xbox Live network.

Other features like TV, the friends list, and followers lists were also demonstrated. Skype was also shown and Microsoft uses the Kinect’s focusing software to track users during a Skype call no matter where they are in the room – which, I admit, is actually pretty cool.

One new thing that wasn’t detailed before is that the rendering of the video happens locally on the console and the video is then uploaded to Xbox Live servers. The maximum recording time is limited to five minutes and the video is stuck at 720p resolution at 30fps.

For those of you interested in what kind of internet you’d need to make this work smoothly, a five minute-long 720p uncompressed video at 30fps should take up about 930MB of drive space. Microsoft has not detailed what compression they’re using for video uploads, but with an average ADSL upload speed of 512Kb/s, uploading the video could take six hours.

The Upload Studio App also briefly showed a disclaimer from Microsoft: “All clips are reviewed for violations of the Xbox Live Code of Conduct. There may be some delay before your clip is shared to anyone else.”

The Xbox One launches in the US, Canada and several European countries on 22 November 2013 at a price of $499 for the US and €499 for Europe. Microsoft South Africa has not detailed when the Xbox One will be available locally.