Kinect + Skype = Video Calling Magic: Tech News and Analysis «

I see one technical problem with this: Skype is heavily peer-to-peer (I just learned from Wikipedia that even the "pe" in the name reflects this).

Xbox 360 communications is not, inherently, very open. You cannot randomly connect an Xbox 360 to another Internet host, you must go through a Microsoft-maintained gateway. So connecting e.g. an Xbox 360 to a Skype client running on a PC would not be simple.

Of course MS could choose to provide such gateways and (probably) change around in the protocol once they own it to make this happen. I'm just pointing out that it's not as easy as "just do it".

See http://www.xbox.com/en-US/Live/EngineeringBlog/072810-Develo... for some talk about the architecture.

I didn't see it before the article, and I still don't see it. What is so revolutionary about adding Kinect to a video chat?

The last video shows that it can (somewhat) detect who is talking and react to that... But unless you're walking around your house and the video can pivot to follow you, I don't see any real use in that.