Microsoft's Major Nelson, Director of Programming for XBox Live, has revealed in his podcast that the XBox Live Vision Camera (XLV) will be released on September 19 in the U.S. and Europe. The XLV will work much like PS2's EyeToy allowing gamers to personalize their gamertag image, chat over Live and send photo messages to other users.
As is usually the case, there will be games developed with the camera in mind and we already know of Uno and Texas Hold'Em Poker.
The XBox 360 vision camera has given rise to quite a bit of speculation since its official premiere at E3 2006 as the company behind it is Gesture Tek. The name may not mean much to most of you but Gesture Tek, as industry insiders insist, is a busy company currently developing quite a few innovative and relevant technologies. You can have a look at Gesture Tek's vision of how the XLV will work in FPS games in a neat demonstration of the HeadLock Feature.
Another, even more interesting fact about Gesture Tek is that they have developed a technology which uses 2 cameras to recognize input from the user. The end result should be very familiar to Nintendo Wii fans and there may be potential there to bring that functionality, at some point in time, to the X360. A brief demonstration of how that technology, dubbed GestPoint, works is available from the official .
