The Xbox One is a games console pretending to be the computer from the USS Enterprise. A hypothetical Star Trek: The Next Generation episode where Commander Riker says, "Computer, tell me how handsome my beard is" and it obediently shows him mugshots of his face before he logs into Forza Motorsport 5, is sort of what they are aiming for.

But Xbox One is not running on spaceships and it has no holodeck yet. At least, that is not written on the fact sheet that I was given. Perhaps the holodeck is DLC. What I do know is that Microsoft wants to conveniently integrate every living room service – TV, games, apps and internet browser – into one black box the size of a breeze block and have you sternly give it instructions like it's a naughty puppy.

This is more exciting than I've made it sound: the joke where you say, "Xbox, sit. Good Xbox. Xbox, go to Bing. Xbox, search for Google," actually has more longevity than you might first assume – not least because voice commands really work now. But it does come off as an incredibly nosy piece of surveillance equipment – sometimes you wonder if all this integration is just so that metrics can be taken on how long you can stand watching someone murder a hit song on X Factor before you boot up Call of Duty to shoot virtual people in the neck.

But such a feat of technological wonderment as a next generation-console takes hard work to conceive, execute, manufacture and distribute. I asked Phil Harrison, corporate vice president at Microsoft EMEA, on his feelings about the launch logistics of his beast of the future, the Xbox One. "It's a fascinating exercise of orchestrating and conducting an amazing array of talent and engineering resources," he told me. "You've got hardware engineering creating a future, you've got creative and engineering around the software that makes your hardware show up in the most incredible way, you've got the online services and cloud set up to support the online experience.

"You also have the logistics of building hardware and operating systems and content, all at the same time … and now, it's the logistics of shipping the hardware all around the world into retail stores and ultimately into people's homes. That's really where it culminates into this enormous crescendo where the people we've built this for get their hands on the experience."

Which all sounds pretty exciting.

Snap, switch, share

Everything has moved on since the Xbox 360, that old clunky overheating beast of the last generation. The new incarnation gets a 64-bit x86 architecture, with a whopping 8GBs of RAM, a Blu-ray drive and a 500GB onboard hard drive and all manner of other flibbertigibbets. Two virtual machines and three operating systems run on it. One machine handles your games, the other deals with entertainment applications. The extra operating system – or 'hypervisor'! – handles switching between functions, so you can seamlessly flip from a Skype chat to TV if the conversation is boring, or from the Machinima app to a multiplayer game as soon as your friends appear online. It works smoothly and quickly, and is much less hassle than juggling remotes.

The ability to 'snap' one window to an already open window also means that you can watch TV in the top corner of your screen as you play a game, or Skype call someone as you search the internet. You can do two things at one without having to switch any inputs or wait until it's convenient. This console gets plus-12 on a scale from 'none' to 'smoothly integrated TV, games and apps', if you need some sort of scoring system.

On top of this, and similarly to PS4, new apps give the ability to extend content made in your living room straight to the gaming community. "From launch," Phil Harrison assures me, "the consumers, the players, the gamers will be the people who give our games personality online. They will be using features like Upload, our personal broadcasting system inside of the console, to share and edit their own video creations with the world. Now it's the community that takes Xbox One to the next level."

Ready to rumble

The gamepad apparently has 40 (yes 40!) improvements. I got a bit bored of counting them after just two. The things you need to know are that the analogue sticks are smaller, more sensitive and have textured edges for comfort; the X, Y, A, B buttons are closer together ("it's better for thumb transit," Keith Stuart tells me) and more press-enjoyable than the last set. The battery pack has been moved inside the body, making the backside more toned. Stop it. And trigger buttons have individual rumble motors in them! That's right. They can rumble you individually, and there's also a greater increase in grades of rumbling. They can simulate a heartbeat, or a gun running out of ammo, in Forza, they simulate the tyres on either side of your car losing traction when braking too hard or over-steering. And Microsoft calls them "impulse triggers". All in all, a score of fifty-squillion comforts out of rumbles.

Pester Power

In June this year, the Xbox One team received heavy criticism for announcing digital rights management policies restricting the sharing of Xbox One's games, and the requirement of daily online authentication of the console. Many decisions were hurriedly reversed to give the consumers the choice they demanded.

According to Microsoft's statement, "After a one-time system set-up with a new Xbox One, you can play any disc-based game without ever connecting online again." In addition to that, the company was keen to point out that it would now enable gamers to gift, resell, share or rent any Xbox One game titles without limit. And there will be no region locks on any of the games. An unusually positive triumph for consumer entitlement.

For Phil Harrison, Microsoft's willingness to listen to its consumers and enact change has given the Xbox One owner a real advantage. "We have given [players] the ability to choose how they consume content, whether it's on disc as a physical media, or online through our store," he said.

Added in to this is the fact that anyone in your house can access your digital games even if you're not at home or signed in. You can also sign in on a friend's Xbox One and access your own digital games.

The Xbox One receives five stars out of no DRMs.

Venting and planking

The Xbox One allows horiziontal orientation only – planking across your living room. Photograph: KeystoneUSA-ZUMA / Rex Features

To address the problems that the 360 had with cooling, the entirety of the Xbox One console resembles one giant air vent. The side of the console looks like those air conditioning slits in your car dashboard but on a large scale. Heat is being taken seriously.

At the same time, Microsoft has made the sentimental pastime of kicking the console over from its vertical perch difficult this time round. Xbox One allows HORIZONTAL ORIENTATION ONLY, planking supine across your living room. This means that it will be less likely I will kick the console over accidentally when drunk, laser burning my Hamish Macbeth DVDs. I give this console 28 horizontals out of 32.

The biometric system

You can voice command your Xbox One, TV, set-top box, and AV system via the Kinect, which comes bundled with the Xbox One. The Kinect, for those that don't already know, is a motion and audio sensor, and this version is much more powerful, having the ability to track six different people at once in a variety of lighting conditions and much smaller rooms. The camera is apparently so precise, it can track individual fingers from three metres away.

The previous version could hardly figure out what was arse and what was elbow and was terrible at scoring me at Just Dance. However, this new sensitivity has allowed the creators of Just Dance 2014 to add six-player choreography, including human pyramids. And the new game Xbox Fitness uses Kinect like a heart-rate monitor. According to Microsoft, the technology, "detects micro-fluctuations in your skin optically to read your heart rate, absolutely touch free, from up to 10 feet away".

Assessing arousal

This led me to question what else the new Kinect can tell about my body from far away. Can it detect an unborn child's heartbeat? If it can see far away fingers and take a pulse, can it detect let's say "fluctuations" in … intimate areas? As a journalist, I decided it was necessary for me to see if this was possible. Nick Burton, development director and Kinect specialist at Rare was my unfortunate victim, sorry, chosen specialist. He said, "Kinect for Xbox One cannot detect skin heat – rather it can detect skin colour, using RGB and Active IR, and human blush response from that. Coupled with player movement analysis, you could potentially infer excitement levels, but we could not speak to the accuracy of this data right now."

That's an acknowledgement of possibility, I'd say. I would like someone to use this information to make a game that amounts to arousal chicken, where the person who gets turned on is out. This may be somewhat unrealistic though, and I accept that even if this game were possible, it would probably only sell to me. However, recent reliance on metrics to gauge player attention opens up the possibility that in future, Kinect information could be used to manipulate players' excitement in new ways. Yes, it is all rather daunting to think about.

Light blasting

Kinect 2: The Return works so well because it includes an infrared blaster array, which they assure me is perfectly safe despite its name. In other words, it drenches your whole room in infrared light, allowing accurate control of your TV, console and set-top box with voice and movement. From your home screen, you can tell Xbox One to load up a game or to find your favourite TV show, or you can say "Xbox Mute" if it's making a nuisance of itself. Skype functions in fullscreen HD in conjunction with Kinect, and the Kinect camera can follow you around the room mid-call, as though you're delivering a soliloquy. You can pin preferred Skype contacts, games, films, albums and apps to your homepage, creating a custom front-end.

Every person in your household can have a sign-in, and you can both have a jolly good fight with each other by yelling '"Xbox show my stuff!" to see whose voice it will obey more fervently. It's impressively good at recognising and picking out separate voices, immediately changing the user setup for the last person who shouted at it.

After a while "show my stuff" seems like an oddly intimate command, and you're not sure you want it to show too much stuff. Unless you're me.

Butt Recognition

As soon as you have made a biometric profile of your appearance, it can sense that you are in the room and logs you into your personalised home screen automatically. I've done tests to see if I can sneak past it without it noticing. I entered the room arse first once and indeed, it failed to recognise me. From this I deduce that the Kinect login recognises only facial features, and that my arse thankfully doesn't resemble my face. This also means that if the Xbox One rises up against us one day, we can fool it just by walking butt-first everywhere.

Paranoid android

The powerful capabilities of the Xbox One can come off as quite creepy. Wander into the path of the Kinect's vision during the configuration process and it'll put a little tag above your face on the screen to say it's seen you. Once it knows you, the camera follows you around the room as you go about your embarrassingly mundane tasks, silently judging you as you pick your nose and drink orange juice out of the carton. And while Kinect doesn't have to be connected up for the Xbox One to function, if you do leave it on, it's always listening so you can tell your console to turn on via voice command.

Part of me wonders whether, if I'm on the phone to one of my many boyfriends describing unspeakable things, it may be spitefully searching Bing for chastising terms to attack me with when I start the console up. However, this succinct post by Microsoft attempts to put all my Kinect paranoia to rest with a sweeping finality:



"The system will navigate you through key privacy options, like automatic or manual sign in, privacy settings, and clear notifications about how data is used. When Xbox One is on and you're simply having a conversation in your living room, your conversation is not being recorded or uploaded." "You are in control of when Kinect sensing is on, off or paused: If you don't want the Kinect sensor on while playing games or enjoying your entertainment, you can pause Kinect … When the system is off, it's only listening for the single voice command – "Xbox On," and you can even turn that feature off too."

"Your conversation is not being recorded or uploaded" does have a somewhat haunting vibe to it, though.

The future

‘I just can’t let you beat me at Dead Rising 3, Dave.’ Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

I'm slightly conflicted: this is the stuff of the future, and it is amazing when you can ask Xbox One via voice recognition to switch seamlessly between game, TV or app – but it's problematic when you regard exactly how much information it's possible to store about yourself. Biometric information isn't any minor thing. Microsoft claims that no personal details leave the console to be stored in the cloud without explicit permission, and has assured us privacy is taken very seriously.

But all I remember is the last time Sony was hacked, or how HAL just can't do that Dave. If the Xbox One became sentient, the chances are all it would know is that I like to make my desktop bright pink and login to my profile with my bum, but, well, recently governments have been getting really cosy with technology companies. I am increasingly sensible of how we slowly adapt to each new technological intrusion until it's normalised. Then, companies change the terms and conditions we are accustomed to by updating before sending us a dialogue box that we'll click 'Yes' on without reading. They want us to buy it, and they ask us to say yes to amendments later, when we're drunk on its magic.

And yet, Zoo Tycoon is so very, very magic.

The games

The real reason we're all here is for the games, right?

"We've got the best launch line-up of any console," Phil Harrison tells me, incredibly confidently. And this may be true, particularly for what everyone calls the "core" gamer, who is broadly interested in killing things. Ryse is certainly a beautiful game about Ancient Rome, if entirely made up of creatively stabbing people in the neck using quicktime events, and Dead Rising 3 looks like a larger-mapped, more extravagantly-outfitted zombie-slaughter game than the previous two capable Dead Rising titles. Call of Duty's there too, if you like war-shooting and that.

Forza Motorsport 5 features the unique technology of the 'Drivatar', described on the Microsoft Research site as a "clone" or a "replicant" of you, the player: a driving avatar that can learn and mimic your own driving style and then recreate it in AI form. "You teach it to drive like you do and you can keep on training it until it reaches the dizzy heights of perfection," according to the website. You can also download your friends' Drivatars from the cloud and race them. But I woke up in a cold sweat the other night thinking about what if my Drivatar came to envy my fleshly body, and offed me in the night by possessing next door's Volvo and driving it over my bed.

By far the most wonderful launch title on the Xbox One is Zoo Tycoon, created by Frontier Developments, the company founded by industry legend David Braben. A game essentially about creating and running a zoo in the vein of Simcity, Zoo Tycoon also works closely with Kinect capabilities, so that you can walk around the wildlife idyl you have made, and then interact in first person view with the animals by gesturing in several different ways. You can feed them, wash them, and even prat about making silly gestures for them to copy. I spent an hour last week making faces at a virtual monkey, winking and waving and giggling at the furry thing's mirror expressions. It's almost like a kind of very gentle therapy.

"I actually just find myself watching the animals to see what they get up to," David Braben says, like a technologically advanced David Attenborough. "Just putting two animals in an enclosure and waiting to see them together, seeing how an animal and a baby interact, or how two animals interact. A lot of it is quite subtle – it's not the sort of thing that you can expect from a game. And yes, we don't have a gunsight. And that for me, in many ways, is a positive."

And much of the games that might not have included the traditional gunsights could have been independently-made games. Though Sony has made a big deal of courting independent developers, not much has been said by Xbox One about indies apart from about their ID@Xbox scheme, which is a gatekeeping process that invites indies to register, to receive development kits, submit game information, and then publish on Xbox One Marketplace. It also provides studios with a free licence to develop using the popular Unity engine.

There has been some positive progress. Microsoft's London-based Lift Studio is currently 'incubating' the small indie developer Dlala, founded by industry veteran, Aj Grand-Scrutton. "The relationship we are in right now is this mixture of co-development, mentoring and publishing," he explains. "The support we've received as a studio has allowed us to be able to grow the team and it's helped us adapt and get ready for next year when we go out into the big scary world again.

"We're personally really excited for Xbox One. It's a fantastic piece of hardware and MS are really putting some force behind the indie push. The fact they are looking to make all consoles dev kits at some point next year, the free Unity licences and the support network they have in-house all mean it's a great console to develop for."

But this isn't a universal viewpoint. Independent developer Byron Atkinson-Jones' experience of submitting to the Microsoft process hasn't been entirely positive so far. "I've given up on actively pursuing Xbox One developer status," he said by email, "and I've set Microsoft a challenge – the only way I will believe that they are truly being indie friendly is when I see an Xbox One dev-kit arrive at my front door within the next month. They know where to find me. Until that happens, my feeling is that they are treating most indies as second-class developers. Sony aren't doing that – they are embracing us with open arms and being incredibly supportive."

More should become next year when the ID@Xbox program really kicks into gear.

Final thoughts

Rumours that the Xbox One will be delivered to your house by one of these are totally untrue. Photograph: Chris Polk/WireImage

Discussing with Phil Harrison what sort of vision he had for Xbox One, I say it's interesting that they want to make a games console that can become such a focal point for the living room, a futuristic hub of our times.

"We think the largest screen in the house, typically in the living room, is the place where the most amazing entertainment experiences are always going to be," Phil replies. "Whether it's playing games, whether it's watching movies, or whether it is using Kinect as a communication device with Skype – being able to put Skype in HD in your living room transforms the nature of communication in a really amazing way.

"That's what we wanted to do with Xbox One, to create an entertainment device that was the best place to play games, was the place where all of your entertainment, including your television, could be enjoyed, and to have the power and simplicity and ease of use to allow any user to get the most out of the system, whether they're a core gamer, or someone more interested in the entertainment offerings."

Part of me wonders quite what we're getting ourselves into, and part of me really does want to live on the USS Enterprise.