At the keynote during the Consumer Electronics Show, Microsoft Corp. announced that sales of its Kinect motion sensor for Xbox 360 game console reached eight million units within sixty days of sales. The success of the Kinect shows massive potential of motion-sensing user interfaces in general and the so-called natural user interfaces in particular.

"Just two months ago we took our biggest step in transforming the entertainment for the whole family. We launched Kinect for Xbox 360, opening the broad world of entertainment for the entire family. [...] As many of you know, we predicted that we would sell about 5 million of these Kinect sensors by the end of the holiday season. We beat that forecast. In the first 60 days we sold over 8 million Kinect sensors worldwide, " said Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer of Microsoft.

The Kinect sensor can be plugged via USB bus directly into any Xbox 360 and features an RGB camera, a depth sensor, audio sensors, and motion-sensing technology that tracks 48 points of movement on the human body. Kinect has the ability to recognize faces and voices. Kinect can perform full-motion tracking of the human body at 30 frames per second. While the depth sensor supports 640x480 resolution, currently it has 320x240 resolution limit in order to consume less bandwidth. Microsoft Kinect currently costs $149 in the U.S. and 135 EUR in the E.U.

"Xbox 360 has been the No. 1 selling console every month for the last six months here in the United States. And sales for the Xbox 360 are now over 50 million units worldwide.  This has been the biggest holiday and the biggest year ever for Xbox," added Mr. Ballmer.

Tags: Microsoft, Kinect, Xbox