The 2011 Consumer Electronics Show is in full swing and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer used the company’s keynote last night to unveil some new toys for the Kinect owner.
Avatar Kinect is a virtual chat room with Avatars, powered by Kinect, that brings “[facial] recognition, body tracking [and] even facial expressions” to your living room. As you can see from the screenshot above, Kinect-owning Xbox 360 players will be able to circle the lawn chairs and have an awesome conservation in a trailer park. OK, those Avatars are tailgating, but they’re still in a parking lot surrounded by RVs.
Ballmer also threw out some numbers during this bull session and revealed that 8 million Kinect sensors were sold this holiday season. And if these users weren’t on Xbox Live before, they are now, as Ballmer announced the online service’s total user population recently surpassed 30 million users (out of 50 million Xbox 360 systems sold worldwide).
Ballmer closed out the game portion of Microsoft’s CES discussion with a Windows Phone 7 presentation. You can check out the video below for a closer look at Microsoft’s de facto handheld system after the jump.
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Sir Howard Stringer, Kaz Hirai, and the rest of the gang took the stage at CES and presented Sony’s unified strategy going forward in 2011, with bold claims that it will be the premier consumer electronics manufacturer in the US by 2013. As the title suggests, the highlights were 3D, Bravia televisions, and Qriocity, Sony’s video and music cloud-based service. The company is implementing 3D into every device imaginable, from TVs and PS3s (including Gran Turismo 5 and Uncharted 3 demos) to camcorders, Vaio laptops, and Ericsson Xperia smartphones.
Like two action figures that come together to form an even bigger action figure, THQ will raid Mattel’s toy chest in a multi-year deal to create games based on many of the company’s biggest properties.
