Xbox One recognises your face, your voice and obeys your commands. So is this the future of home entertainment?

Published: 17:00 EDT, 25 May 2013 | Updated: 17:00 EDT, 25 May 2013

Microsoft Xbox One
Price to be announced                             ★★★★★

Games console launches usually stick to a strict formula.

Videos of virtual faces show off the machine’s graphics power – lovingly lingering on flowing, wind-blown hair until you are half expecting an actress to coo: ‘Because I’m worth it.’

Next, smiling salesmen take the stage and talk about the console’s powers of conveying ‘emotion’, before showing video montages of people being shot, racing cars skidding round corners and soldiers in balaclavas sliding down ropes.

GAMES: Supercharged with new levels of artificial intelligence. Electronic Arts promises characters with ‘human-like intelligence’ (albeit only footballers). Forza Motorsport 5 showed off details such as flames bursting from exhaust pipes, tyres with smoke from individual treads, and bodywork like someone had gone berserk with a can of Turtle Wax

Microsoft’s launch of the Xbox One in Seattle this week was different.

It was a full hour before Call Of Duty: Ghosts obliged with a video of a special forces soldier swinging through a window.

The only real reassurance that, yes, this was a games console launch, was available outside.

There you found a gigantic queue of potbellied nerds for the men’s toilets and no queue at all for the women’s.

Xbox One, though, is very keen not to be a simple games console.

It’s half games machine, half voice-controlled TV box; it can afford to be, as the black box is so huge it looks like you could park a Honda Civic inside.

It’s a surefooted move from Microsoft and one that might just catapult their machine from cult appeal into the mainstream.

CAMERA: The Kinect camera – great for dance titles – is now shipped with every console, and is so hi-tech it’s faintly alarming. It can now watch six people at once, though it works better in smaller rooms. The camera is so accurate that it can ‘watch’ users’ heartbeats in exercise games

If Apple really is planning a TV, then its board members must have watched Microsoft’s event with a sheen of sweat on their foreheads, for Xbox One offers a vision of the future of television.

You yell at it: ‘Xbox: on!’, ‘Xbox: TV!’ – and it recognises your voice and obeys.

You say: ‘Game Of Thrones’ and it finds out for you when it’s showing (probably never, unless you pay Sky several hundred pounds a year).

The console recognises your face as soon as you walk in front of its Kinect camera,  and switches instantly to a menu of your favourite shows, or ‘unpauses’ what you were last watching.

Xbox One has taken on the seemingly impossible task of ‘making TV more intelligent’ – perhaps a necessary mission in a world where Embarrassing Bodies Live exists.

CONTROLS: You can control the machine via phone, tablet or PC with Xbox’s Smartglass app, using Android phones as a remote control for the machine. The machine’s microphone also ‘listens’ for commands continuously, so you can say: ‘Xbox: take call’ if you get an incoming Skype call while you are watching a film

It offers online TV built in, via apps such as Netflix and Sky, and it will also connect to set-top boxes.

The console shows you what the world is watching via a ‘trending’ page – and you can instantly see what friends are watching online and talk to them via built-in Skype.

So once you discover a friend’s secret Glee addiction, you can begin taunting them – instantly.

It’s a smart move, and one that you suspect Sony watched with horror – its PS4 launch focused entirely on games.

Videos of flowing hair were involved, but Microsoft’s box is hunting bigger game.

The last Xbox effortlessly outpaced the PS3 and Wii for online gaming, with a service that made it easy to find friends online, then shoot them with a sniper rifle.

Xbox One aims to bring that same smooth, ‘social’ feel to watching TV.

In an age where social networks turn into an uninhabitable wasteland during The X Factor, as the entire nation sits furiously Facebooking about how terrible it all is, this makes a great deal of sense.

Handled right, Xbox One could conquer a lot of living rooms.

With millions of HD cameras pointing into living rooms around the world, it also might just change how television is made.

Microsoft says that its studios are already looking at ideas for ‘interactive game shows’. Now that truly is a scary thought. Click here to purchase

GAMES

LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD

£2.99, iPad

Child actors read the text in Little Red Riding Hood, and children can prod on screen to lead our food-basket-carrying heroine into (or out of) peril

The fairy tale becomes an interactive cartoon – a much better idea than the ‘dark’ 2011 film version. Child actors read the text, and children can prod on screen to lead our food-basket-carrying heroine into (or out of) peril. A well-crafted, fun idea. Click here to purchase                        4/5

RESIDENT EVIL: REVELATIONS

From £22.99, PC, PS3, Xbox 360, Wii U

No zombies - instead, the usual cast of terrible actors are assaulted by the Ooze, a race of watery bioweapons who are, it must be said, a little zombie-like

Set on a cruise ship, the latest entry in the survival-horror series is a blazing return to form. No zombies – instead, the usual cast of terrible actors are assaulted by the Ooze, a race of watery bioweapons who are, it must be said, a little zombie-like.                                                          5/5

PUZZLE GRID

Free, iPad, iPHONE

Puzzle Grid is a naggingly compulsive game where you slot together brightly coloured pieces to create butterflies and other shapes

Jigsaw puzzles meet Rubik’s cube – and somewhere in the wreckage is Puzzle Grid, a naggingly compulsive game where you slot together brightly coloured pieces to create butterflies and other shapes. A superb hi-tech take on jigsaws.                                                                                   3/5