Durkin: Kinect can "track some" usage and possibly "cater what content gets presented to you"

Dennis Durkin, Xbox’s chief operating officer,has said Kinect can provide Microsoft with the means to track consumer usage thus offering the customer experiences which they would be interested in.

While this sounds a bit like the "like" button you see on Facebook which eventually only shows ads on products you may be interested in, it is sort of like that, only not.

"I think what we've found is the core gamer may have been the person who brought the box into the house, but as you add new experiences and broader content choices for other members of the house, they come and use the system," Durkin said during the BMO Capital Markets conference in New York today. "We can track some of that usage as it relates to broader family members in the house.

"Kinect actually brings an interesting opportunity as it relates to that. Obviously with Kinect, it has facial recognition, voice recognition... we can cater what content gets presented to you based on who you are."

According to Gamasutra, this can allow Microsoft to "adapt the content it suggests depending on who it sees in front of it".

"Your wife in the future might get a different set of content choices than you, because we have a smart device that knows her preferences are different than yours," Durkin said. "Those are the kinds of things that, when you add this new sensor into the equation, there's a bunch of business opportunities that also come with that."

Feedback from those using the device will eventually help Microsoft learn more about the installed base and who is doing what on Xbox 360.

Durkin also said 40 percent of the time spent playing around on Xbox Live by Gold members was spent on non-gaming applications.

It has been estimated by Microsoft that Xbox Live earned $1 billion in fiscal 2010 with around 50 percent of users pay for Gold memberships.