It has to be said that these are unconfirmed rumors stemming from a gamer known as SuperDaE and reported by Kotaku.com. The information may have come from a Durango Developer’s Kit that SuperDaE has tried to sell on eBay. Either way, much of the information provided to Kotaku tallies with other leaked information – such as that reported by GadgetReview last month.
All agree that an improved version of Kinect will be included with Durango. What is new is the suggestion that this new Kinect will be compulsory, to the extent that the console won’t function without it. The official line appears to be that it will provide certainty for developers, who can produce new games confident that all Durango users will be potential customers.
However, there is some concern that this new Kinect will include the technology described in the Microsoft patent application #20120278904, and titled Content distribution regulation by viewing user. In other words, one of the purposes behind the Kinect requirement is for it to act as a digital rights management system by spying on its users.
The patent application describes a “method of distributing content to a user... and monitoring the presentation of the content at the device to determine the number of users consuming the content during the performance.” The word ‘Kinect’ does not appear in the application, but ‘computing environment’ does. “A computing environment may be a computer, a gaming system or console, or the like. According to an example embodiment, the computing environment may include hardware components and/or software components such that computing environment may be used to execute applications such as gaming applications, non-gaming applications, or the like.”
The system could, then, be used to monitor the game players and determine whether they, or even that number of players, are licensed to use the system. Or whether streaming video has been properly licensed; or whether underage children are watching adult material. Since another suggestion is that the Durango will also require constant connection to the internet, the potential for use of Kinect with this ‘content distribution regulation’ in passing data back to a central licensing repository and responding accordingly becomes clear.