New Kinect Patent Can Watch You Play
As Microsoft expands its Xbox and Kinect branding to movies and TV show entertainment, more and more content providers are jumping aboard to reach a wider audience. It's a unique platform that Microsoft presents, and with Kinect, it even provides content holders and advertisers various tools to tweak their campaigns. For example, Microsoft recently introduced a NuAds feature in Kinect where it would allow advertisers to push up a poll or other such tricks to get viewers to interact with their advertisement.
Now, with this recent patent, it seems Microsoft is also looking to hand over control to how many viewers could view said content.
According to the patent, the tech could check to see if the number of users exceed a certain threshold set by the content provider, beyond which the user must purchase a license for a greater viewing. This is obviously to protect content meant for personal viewing to be used for a public performance, but how will content providers determine what is personal and what is public? Would a group of 10 friends be considered as a public performance?
The patent isn't limited to just Kinect, it can be implemented to head-mounted devices, large screens, gaming and media products, computers and mobile phones. These devices can then limit the number of times the content can be viewed in a given time-frame, to a limited number of users, and can even monitor the viewers during the content's play.
If Microsoft is hoping to realize the patent, the first implementation may be seen in Kinect 2.0, which the company plans to ship with its next-gen Xbox console rumored to release this year. Of course, patents such as these usually never make it beyond a filing secure, so there might not be something to worry about it just yet.
Via, Extreme Tech.
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