Curious to know what features Skype has in the new Xbox One? So am I. With the Xbox One, you get an all-in-one entertainment system that aims to take over your living/family room not just for gaming but for communicating as well. All Xbox Ones come with Skype pre-installed, and since every Xbox One ships with a Kinect, they'll also include 1080p HD cameras and beamforming stereo array microphones, this is the ultimate Skype-on-TV experience. Makes me wonder if near-ubiquitous video conferencing in the home has finally arrived since Microsoft will no doubt sell at least 10 million Xbox One units.

Further, Xbox LIVE Gold subscribers buying Xbox Ones also get Skype Premium for free for six months, which adds group video calls and 100 minutes of telephone calling to 60 countries. Adding Skype to Xbox One is no small feat. You have to remember that Skype needs to be able to dynamically scale itself from an audio only call to a HD 1080p video stream, without any stuttering in game frame-rate, which would impact the user experience - not to mention gamers are notoriously anti-lag and will tolerate none. Skype for Xbox One has full system-wide integration. That means using Xbox One's speech-rec functionality you can say “Xbox, go to Skype” to launch the app or even better, you can also say “Xbox, call Tom” to call a contact favorite instantly, as well as “Xbox, hang up”.

Check out the behind-the-scenes look on how Skype was added to Xbox One along with skeletal tracking:

Now check out auto-zoom and skeletal tracking in action:

In group video calling, you can view one person fullscreen or see up to 4-people side-by-side mini-Brady Bunch style. It also supports screen sharing, which is pretty cool.

via The Next Web