Microsoft unveils Xbox Fitness Personal Training Service

Microsoft has now unveiled Xbox Fitness, a Kinect-powered workout service for the upcoming Xbox One that will initially be offered free to Xbox Live subscribers.

Xbox Fitness is a new online service built exclusively for Xbox One that takes the world's most popular fitness videos and makes them interactive. The extensive library of videos from the world's biggest fitness brands including Beachbody's P90X® (Tony Horton) and INSANITY® (Shaun T), Jillian Michaels, Tracy Anderson and others, will be available for free with Xbox Live Gold memberships through December 2014.

Using precision Kinect technology, Xbox Fitness can read user's heart rate without a monitor; see which muscles are most engaged by measuring the power, force and transfer of weight in the body, and track the quality of the user's performance by measuring your balance, tempo and form.

Xbox Fitness will deliver personalised program recommendations based on user's workout history and past performance, highlight the most popular workouts among Xbox Fitness users, and offer a variety of workouts, from 10 to 60 minutes in length.

Xbox Fitness also helps user's push themselves to work harder and stay motivated. Challenges are integrated into your workouts through Xbox Live, tracking performance history and awards and delivering competitive social challenges.

Fitness has been a part of the Kinect experience since the sensor was first released, but Microsoft's upcoming Xbox One looks set to reinvent the experience. Previously the user's experience featured digital avatar hosts and odd virtual worlds. However, Microsoft's new and highly detailed Kinect sensor enables an entirely new type of interactivity on the Xbox One, making use of muscle mapping, balance calculations, and limb orientation detection.

The new resolution and processing power makes the system capable of detecting much finer movements, meaning that it's not just about big moves like squats and lunges any more.

The trainers providing library content are excited about these new developments, as the better resolution and processing power mean, as noted, a better ability to capture and account for smaller-scale movements.

Tracy Anderson described the new effect as allowing her to "deal with rotations that cause the smaller muscles to wake up, too."

Microsoft even recently put on a demonstration in New York, where it showed how the system could catch a lunge done too far, and provide correction information that resulted in the next lunge being done perfectly.

For more information www.xbox.com/en-AU/xbox-one/games/xbox-fitness