Xbox One owners will be able to work off their flab using the new Kinect this holiday season thanks to Xbox Fitness, a new program that integrates workout videos with the motion-monitoring capabilities of the 3D camera.
A brief video accompanying the announcement shows the Kinect tracking users' motion as they're directed by video of famous trainers including Tony Horton (Beachbody’s P90X), Shaun T (Insanity), Jillian Michaels (Ripped in 30), and Tracy Anderson (Metamorphosis). The system gives feedback on areas like balance, precision, tempo, and form during workouts lasting 10 to 60 minutes. Xbox Fitness is also able to monitor your heart rate without a physical monitor by using the Kinect camera to detect small changes in skin hue caused by blood flow.
Xbox Fitness will be available this holiday season (though Microsoft pointedly did not say it would be available at the system's launch) and will be free for Xbox Live Gold subscribers through the end of 2014. It's unclear if you'll be able to purchase the program without subscribing to Microsoft's Gold service, which costs $60 a year.
Fitness software is nothing new to the world of gaming, of course; the genre saw a brief moment of immense popularity surrounding the launch of Wii Fit [1] and again around the initial rollout of the original Kinect. Offering the program for free to many users is another way Microsoft is trying to prove the value proposition of including a new Kinect in every Xbox One package.
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