They did announce the Xbox app on Windowns should be updated soon, from my understanding any sufficiently strong PC will get everything Helix will offer. There was even a slide there about MS asking devs to develop Xbox games as PC games.

Me I do not want Microsoft to track my eyes/ my gestures or record my voice in my living room. 

That's fair and it shouldn't be mandatory but every smart device does the same thing anyway. Your phones know more about you than a Kinect could possibly gather. Eye tracking especially should be the least of anyone's concerns lol. You'd just be staring at the contents of the flame/screen 

Yes, I know and it annoys me; I am staying away from smart devices when I can, without going full tinfoil hat.

If next Xbox hardware will cost more than $1000, then I expect the price for PS6 will be above the current price of PS5 Pro. Both won't sell well at those prices, given how fragile current job market situation is. All hope on Nintendo with their next Switch 2 iterations, as they can delay Switch 3 to 2034 at this rate.

Even in VR gesture controls suck. Pressing virtual buttons is a disaster imo. The virtual menus always react to just moving your hands about. No I did not press that! In Aces of Thunder I take the headset off to configure the controls on TV with a normal controller as the VR controls are frustrating. Point and click works, but you need a (motion) controller for that.

Eye tracking is also very unreliable. It's good enough for foveated rendering, yet in Puzzling Places where it is used to select pieces by guiding the pointer, it's much slower than just using the pointer. And that's with the eye track cameras right in front of your eyes, Kinect won't be able to track your eyes.

Voice works though but you don't need Kinect for that. A little microphone in the controller will do.

Kinect is good for Dance Central and can certainly help with VR, full body tracking. But I doubt MS will do anything for VR with project Helix.

".... and just how much of an advantage it will have over PS5 Pro."

PS6 is looking like it will be a good bit faster than the PS5pro as well.... like atleast twice as fast.
The New Xbox, will likely have like +50% on that (so like x3 the performance of a PS5 pro).


"....or will it be quite dramatically better?"

It will be dramatically better than the PS5pro.
However I suspect both will be aiming for 120hz TV's in marketing and design philosophy.....  if we get another half a gen (atleast) of cross platform support and developement from 1st and 3rd party, I suspect alot of it will just be slightly higher resolutions and FPS on the newer consoles.

Late gen, with path tracing, there might be a real visual jump, compared to this gen though (for PS6/New Xbox exclusives).




MLID leaks:

New Xbox:
408mm^2 chip
~300-350watts
192bit bus and upto 36-48gb Ram.
NPU with ~110 TOPs (@6watts)
68 CU's RDNA 5, GDDR7

price of around 1300-1500$



PS6:
280mm^2 chip
~160-180watts
160bit bus (~640 GB/s memory bandwidth) ~30gb ram.
54 CU's RDNA5 (~ @3ghz, 40 Tflops), GDDR7

Raster performance 2.5-3 times that of the base PS5.
Ray Tracing 6-12 times the performance of base PS5.

With FSR4 he expects ingame performance in certain titles to reach upto ~8 times that of the PS5 (fps wise, if running the same settings/resolutions), in say a game with good amounts of raytracing.



Xbox will be alot more powerfull than the PS6..... like upwards of +50% of the PS6.
Going by MLID claims.

The thing is the PS6 might be like ~800$ (because its sold at a loss).
While the xbox will need to be sold a profit, if its allowing 3rd party stores, and its a much more expensive piece of hardware to make (potentially ~1500$).

Hmm, haven't had experience of any of those so can't really comment. What I will say though is that there is probably a huge range in quality of experiences on offer, different headsets/software will vary.

A dedicated UI application by MS with hardware based AI/ML assistance will likely beat a generic VR game applicauin by quite a bit imo... But also maybe not. I'm just thinking out loud 

Going from 54 to 68 is "up to 50% more powerful" ?

Even if we assume MS could drive the much larger chip at the same clocks (big if, the bigger the chip, the harder it gets for clocks) then that would be +25%. 

I think Sony can live with that. And let's not forget Windows 11 will likely eat some of that +25%

It's the lack of physical feedback that is the problem. It's no issue pressing the button, the issue is accidentally pressing buttons just moving your hands, like the Wii mote would interpret a back swing as the intended swing rather than pulling your hand back to make a forward swing.

Since there is no physical feedback you tend to stick your fingers / hand through the buttons, then when repositioning you end up activating other buttons. 

Maybe it can improve with AI assistance, trying to distinguish intent from simply moving your hand / arm. For now the only way to measure intent is by pressing a physical button.

It's the same with 'VR controls' beyond buttons. Opening a door without feeling the door handle, always issues trying to open a locker door to stuff a corpse in lol. Reloading a gun, miming it out while waving your hands in thin air is not great. The more I play VR, the more I tend to avoid games with 'VR controls', preferring games with physical buttons to interact with the environment.

I don't know. I've played hundreds of VR games all with their own UIs, point and click method with a steady menu works best. Minority report style interface sucks in reality. Maybe with added mind control it could work, but then you need to wear something on your head again :/

Perhaps a new Kinect can be accurate enough you can point your index finger at the UI and move your thumb to click, thumb being the mouse button. It's just very hard to replace the accuracy and speed of a mouse with multiple buttons. But easier to replace a controller. Point and click is very hard to improve on!