Here’s what the Xbox One’s new Kinect is capable of

The Xbox One’s all-seeing eye isn’t just there for shits and giggles. While many gamers are familiar with the basic “Xbox turn on” or “Xbox turn off” commands, the new Kinect is much more capable and can recognize a host of various inputs not so well-known. Microsoft recently released a “cheat sheet” including examples of different voice prompts and gesture inputs. Why Microsoft didn’t simply include this in the Xbox One’s manual, remains a mystery to us all.

Xbox One was officially launched last week with hope of wooing the tech industry with its innovative, next-gen features. One of its most hyped features being the power of the new Kinect 2.0. This camera-slash-motion sensing peripheral lets owners of Microsoft’s new console control their Xbox One experience via hand gestures and voice commands.

Some good to know command inputs includes uttering the magical word “Xbox”. This will open up a whole list of all the available commands at your disposal. Saying “Xbox select” will highlight all text on your display in green that could be used or spoken.

Here’s a list of the current available voice commands:

To use the Snap feature, saying “Xbox snap (name the app)” will let you open up a secondary app while gaming or watching a movie for instance.

If you become a household annoyance or get tired of commanding your media entertainment centre vocally, you can always opt to intuitively waving your arms around or making funny gestures with your hands. Here are some examples you should know about:

While these commands might improve, or just alter your overall UI experience, some more innovative features of the new Kinect include things like biometric scanning where it can recognize specific users, even reading your pulse to help monitor your performance when using one of the Xbox fitness apps.

It can even identify and monitor your muscles and physical performance to measure the power, force and transfer of weight in your body.