In the wake of much recent Project Scorpio information, the first images of the device's development kit have emerged. As it's a dev kit, this shouldn't be taken as an indication of how the final product will look. Take a look at one image below, or take a look at the full gallery over at Gamasutra.

The site recently spoke to Xbox boss Phil Spencer about Microsoft's upcoming console. Among other topics, he discussed how he still sees Scorpio as part of the Xbox One family.

"[Xbox One] games will run on Scorpio," he stated. "Any hardware peripheral you have, any game, any app; it is part of the Xbox One family."

"Even when you set [Scorpio] on top of your One, it directly portmaps. Like, you literally plug power in, plug HDMI in, it's all exactly the same," he continued, before adding that he doesn't want to disappoint fans who already own an Xbox One: "We have millions of customers that have made a commitment to the Xbox One generation."

"As we watched how we built it, we realized we could actually build some benefits for … the 1080p customer [as well]," he later added. "Because the capabilities of the box don't dictate that somebody builds their game in 4K, or that you plug in a 4K TV. So if you're running one of our games in 1K, we wanted to do better there as well."

The executive went on to reveal that Microsoft is not forcing developers to work with Scorpio at all: "When you ship an Xbox One game two years from now, even if you don't look at Scorpio as something that you want to take advantage of, fine. That's up to you. We're not mandating that people go and do Scorpio-specific work." He did, however, note that for most triple-A developers, making games for a more powerful machine than Xbox One was not much of an issue as "they already have the assets" from their PC development builds.

Although Microsoft is yet to reveal any plans for a VR headset--its Hololens device is perhaps more accurately labeled as augmented reality--Spencer later reaffirmed his commitment to virtual reality:

"I think we're on like a decade-long journey with VR, and we're still right at the beginning. So I have hesitated to say let's lock on one piece of hardware on our console and say this is it, we've figured out what VR is, this is it. Because from a hardware standpoint I think you can kind of do that, though I still think we're early, but from an experience standpoint I don't think we've seen the things that we need to really have VR break out.

"So we will support VR on Scorpio. We said that onstage. We will support VR on Scorpio, we're going to do that, I think it's important, I think there's some great immersive VR experiences."

Project Scorpio is due to launch this holiday, but it remains to be seen when Microsoft will start to officially show it off in more detail. Xbox boss Phil Spencer has said he is unsure if Microsoft will show off Project Scorpio before E3 in June, while also stating recently that he thinks it's "critical" for first-party games to be ready for the system's launch.

For more on Project Scorpio, check out all our coverage of the latest information: