Fleshing out some aspects of Microsoft's Xbox One

Mike Snider | USA TODAY

Last week's debut of Microsoft's new Xbox One video game console system last week answered some questions about the successor to the Xbox 360, but many remain unanswered with need of elaboration.

Xbox One will not be backward compatible and does not necessarily require a constant Internet connection. And there will be some provision for used games. After the big event, Marc Whitten, chief product officer for Microsoft's interactive entertainment business, took time to sit down with USA TODAY to talk about Xbox One.

VIDEO: USA TODAY's Brett Molina breaks down Xbox One.

Technology has advanced enough that a new Xbox was needed, he says. "Every year, I've looked at where we are with hardware and software and we (ask), "Should we build a new console or should we do a new software update for the 360?' And the answer has always been, 'Let's do software on the 360' until about two years ago when we (could) imagine that the games would look and feel so different than what you can do today. It's the time you could have that quantum leap."

Q: What should people focus on when they look at specs for Xbox One (eight-core AMD processor, 500 GB hard drive, 8GB RAM, etc.)?

A: For me I think about do we have the power for a truly next generation experience and I think the answer to that is clearly, 'Yes,' and you see that in the amount of the memory that we have, the sort of core power of the box, and frankly even the ability to use the cloud as additional power inside of the experience. And then beyond that, you have all of the capabilities of Kinect all of the time. Today on 360, it's an accessory.

Q: How different is it to have Kinect as part of the system all of the time?

A: Because it is so deeply integrated, we're able to do things like recognize you when you say, 'Xbox On.' So not only does Kinect turn on everything in the living room to get it to the right state, but it gets it to your experience and that's really important.

You now have Skype integrated into every experience all of the time and the ability to get Skype calls. If we don't know exactly who is logged in – and I don't mean the family has an account and kind of shares it, but like who – we can't route Skype calls. By integrating it really richly and deeply you get access to that sort of consistent system experience.

And then there's things like being able to detect you and your gamepad and get you into your saved game. If you think about that today (on the Xbox 360), I would pull up the guide, I'd log in as me, I would pick my controller, I'd pick what quadrant and would pick where my saved game was stored. I'd start using that saved game and I'd play. That's a lot of (user interface). Because Kinect is so deeply integrated, it all goes away. Pick up my gamepad, it knows it's me, it gets me to my last game and I just start playing.

Q: So Kinect is always on?

A: When you are in the low power state, it is listening for exactly one thing, 'Xbox On,' which will wake up the system and tell it to get going.

Q: How mechanically different is this Kinect sensor?

A: The sensors are just higher quality. This version is lighting independent (and has) a 1080p wide field of view, which is one of the reasons it's going to be an amazing Skype experience.

Now, we use these infrared sensors that use this time-of-flight technology where we literally bounce these photons off of you and time how long it takes to get back. And it also removes latency out of the system so that it feels faster. Both of those are really important for being able to do things like identification.

And finally, the mike array -- which frankly is the world's best mike array already for these types of scenarios like loud living room environments -- is significantly improved. Everything about it is completely revolutionized.

Q: And it can hear your heartbeat?

A: It can see it. it's called this blush technology where it can detect the blood flow. Now imagine being able to do a fitness game or fitness experience and it can track your heart rate and give you great feedback and give you new exercises all without having to wear any fancy gear.

With Kinect, we could only detect position of the joints and now we can detect rotation on every joint all at the same time. That ability to have rotation on top of the joints creates a massive difference of understanding what is going on in the real world.

We thought of Kinect as the beginning of a decade-plus of investment and innovation in this space. I think you are going to continue to see us deeply, deeply invest in Kinect (technology) not just on Xbox 360 and Xbox One, but in what we are doing with Windows. Think what this could do for remote rehab, a bunch of medical things and fitness, really interesting experiences that are frankly far beyond entertainment that are going to come out of this technology and are going to light up across Microsoft.

Q: There's been a lot of talk about the new Xbox having to be always on the Internet. Can you expand on that?

A: Xbox One needs to connect to the Internet. There are many of the services that are just powered by the Internet, streaming movies, playing multiplayer (games), things like that. If we can't get to the Internet, you can play your single-player games assuming they don't take advantage of something on the Internet that it needs. You can watch Blu-ray movies, you can watch TV. But when you think about the value proposition that we are creating, this is an Internet native device. And so much of that experience is really predicated on getting that content there.

Q: You mentioned a DVR for saving games. Talk about that.

A: The way I think of the hard drive in the box is it's a cache for all of the things you have locally. Because our goal is that all of your content is saved in the cloud so that when you walk up to any console you are going to get your content. So, take the DVR for example, we are constantly saving a buffer of what's been going on, it's not forever but you can go back and save it, you can tag, it will go up to the cloud (and) it would always be available.

Q: Will any pay TV subscriber be able to connect their service through Xbox One?

A: Let me first say that TV is a very complex problem, especially when you look at it internationally, just the way technology and access works is very different. The way I look at it is how do we get the TV that you already have onto the console? One of the key things that we are doing is we have HDMI pass-through, so any HDMI device you'd be able to get that content in. And what we have been doing around a lot of live content, IP-delivered stuff, you've seen that with (Verizon) FiOS and ESPN, that will continue to be big. We are just plugging away to get as much of the TV in as we can.

Q: Talk about the importance of making all of home entertainment available through Xbox One.

A: Today I kind of like to joke that you can already multitask in your living room pretty well, it's just all behind this one magic button on your remote called "Input" because you have to flip between the Blu-ray player or the games machine or live TV. And of course you can do that and people do but when you have a babysitter over you write this long list of instructions of how to watch a movie. It's really complicated.

What we have learned is when that happens, when people can get to multiple classes of content, which they have able to do outside of live TV broadly on the 360 they just do more stuff. Because what happens is you are watching a movie on Netflix and you discover your friend wants to play a game. That virtuous cycle we think is really important for the user experience because it's how you stitch these things together in a really deep way.

Follow Mike Snider on Twitter @MikeSnider .