Zunited
Three new trademark filings, titled “Fusion,” could be a new Xbox, a new Kinect, a new gaming series, or something else entirely. E3 is quickly approaching, coming the second week of June, and everyone wants to get their word in on what they think Microsoft will do next. The company last year announced the availability of the Xbox 360 Slim along with Kinect, so what exactly does Microsoft have up its sleeve to show off just a couple of weeks from now? It turns out that Microsoft recently filed for three trademarks, each of them preceded by the word “Fusion.” It certainly cannot be a next generation Xbox console, dubbed Xbox 720 by the blogosphere, right? Or can it? Each trademark was filed in the United States on March 25th, 2011. They are titled Fusion Genesis, Fusion Sentient, and Fusion Vault (to find these go to uspto.gov and search “980526399″). Fusion Genesis was also outed by Australia’s games ratings on the same day Microsoft’s Kinect Me was also outed. The Australian rating shows that Fusion Genesis (in the Australian filing, contains a colon) is rated PG and is a “computer game” though that seems unlikely for Microsoft. More likely is that it’s an Xbox title. Also likely is that it’s a Kinect title. The company promised practically twice the amount of games to be released this year than previously and that there were dozens in the works. So perhaps Fusion is one of three games, subsequently titled Genesis, Sentient, and Vault. Genesis, by definition, is the origin of something, sentient is a form of perception, and vault means, as a verb, to jump or leap. Seems like a pretty simple explanation. A game where Kinect watches as you jump in your living room to avoid objects. But if that’s true, why weren’t the other two games filed for ratings? To speculate, Fusion could technically be the result of fusing things together, or compartments together — say, music and gaming… or Zune and Xbox, better yet Zune and Kinect (as Zune and Xbox have kind of made that leap). And if we were to take Vault as the noun, is it some sort of cloud-based storage system, like SkyDrive? Or perhaps it’s a way to keep information synced between Xbox and Windows Phone? Sentient could be the way you are perceived in that cloud, like your avatar as member of the AV Science Forum MikeRich speculates. Others think that Fusion could be the start of a gaming series that… well, fuses… an actual controller and the Kinect for hardcore gaming. And don’t even get us started on the fact that the AMD Fusion II will be powering the next generation Xbox, whenever or whatever that will be. No matter what Fusion is, we’ll most likely know in just two weeks at E3. Update: As someone questioned in the comments, no this can’t be a new Fuzion Frenzy game: that’s spelled with a Z instead of an S. http://zunited.net/2011/05/is-fusion-the-next-generation-xbox-kinect-or-just-a-gaming-trilogy/
