By Kelsy Campbell Dollaghan
When
Microsoft introduced Kinect three years ago, it brought pervasive
computing into many homes for the very first time. Today, with the
announcement of Xbox One, it's poised to pull millions of Americans into
the era of the truly connected home. And we're all going to look damn
good getting there.
Xbox One is
less of a console and more of a listening, tracking, and sensing system
aimed at connecting your TV, your computer, your gaming console, and
your phone. “The living room has changed radically over the past eight
years,” we were told during the announcement. “It’s time for tech to
step behind the curtain, and for you and your entertainment to take
center stage.” What does the hardware of a device that's meant to melt
into the background look like?
The Body
Say goodbye to the familiar fins, curves, and green-and-dark-grey palette of the Xboxes of yore.
Xbox One is
a sleek, simple machine whose main defining detail is a half-matte
black, half-glossy black veneer. The entire form factor has been
flattened and simplified, and the only real curvature is a thin dark
chrome strip along the left edge serves as a disk drive.
The main reference here is high-end electronics from a few decades ago, like this Bang & Olufsen transceiver from the 1970s. It's an about-face for Xbox as a brand: up until now, its console design was about bringing the future
into the home, with curving edges, beveled buttons, and a logo that
looked like the spawn of an alien fish. All of that has been thrown to
the wind with Xbox one, which borrows from a classic era of industrial
design—the 1970s—instead looking like it came out of the 2070s.
Kinect
Kinect,
too, has received a design update. Rather than the curved gloss of the
old bar, the new Kinect (which will come standard with every console!)
is a simple black monolith, defined by the elegant sensor casings that
enable the improved UX to read everything from your voice to your
heartbeat. There’s a definite Hal 5000 glint to the body, playing on the
really pretty remarkable intelligence of the improved UX. Importantly,
it tracks the location of the controller, too—the two devices now will
work in unison. “The new Kinect sensor is the binding power between the
Xbox, SmartGlass, and controller,” we learned. “Speak, and your troops
follow your command. Raise your controller, and they follow.”
The Controller
The
controller itself has been rethought too, at least by the standards of
the detail-driven realm of controller design. The ABXY buttons have a
glitzy new key, which took three separate injection molding techniques
to produce, according to a rep. The body has changed quite a bit, too:
the shift of the battery pack away from the underside means you can curl
your hands around the two rails, and the overall dimensions are
smaller, too. Interestingly, the design team printed hundreds of
different prototypes in the studio, using an in-house 3D printer.
All in all, it's a awesome bit of industrial design from the team at
Xbox. They could've caved to ego and created something even flashier and
gaudier than the last console. Instead, they chose the path of
restraint—and as a result, created a system that doesn't quite melt into
the background of a room, but doesn't scream for attention either.
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