Microsoft has today revealed that last week’s revealing 56-page document about their Xbox 720 is the real deal and not as previously thought, an elaborate hoax.
Leaked last week, the document – which dates back to 2010 – states that the next Xbox will feature Blu-ray compatibility, the next iteration in Kinect motion sensing, augmented reality glasses and most surprising of all, a relatively cheap price point of $299.
Having forced websites to remove the document from their websites, Microsoft have now confirmed that the PDF file belongs to them and that the leak is a breach of copyright. If we’re feeling a mischievous, we would point out that the “IEB Roadmap” takes just a few seconds to Google and find, despite Microsoft’s lawyers.
One of the reasons that the document was believed to be legit when it first appeared was that it corresponded with this month’s E3 SmartGlass announcement concerning Xbox cross-media compatibility.
From there, we can now seemingly expect that the console will have AR goggles, Kinect V2 with HD video capture, built-in DVR features and will have 4-6 times the power of the Xbox 360.
“I have been reporting on Microsoft for around 12 years now. That’s not to say I know everything about Microsoft and its processes, but I have a fairly good idea of what is and isn’t an internal doc usually after the first few pages,” said The Verge editor Tom Warren at the time of the document’s leak.
“Couple this with the fact it aligns with other information I’ve seen about Nextbox over the past year, it aligned perfectly.”
Exciting times indeed – now let’s just hope that we don’t have to wait until 2014 to get our hands on it.
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