Gamers are a slothful, portly bunch, prone to chronic acne and poor hygiene—or so the stereotype goes. In reality, the hundreds of millions of gamers across the globe come in all flavors, including fitness nuts. Microsoft's announcement of Xbox Fitness late Thursday should be music to their ears.
Kinect tracks your form and pace, measuring your workout.
Xbox Fitness is an online service exclusively for the upcoming Xbox One console, and it aims to get gamers into shape. Stop me if you've heard of these big fitness names: Tony Horton (P90X) and ShaunT (Insanity), Jillian Michaels, and Tracy Anderson.
The service is free to Xbox Live Gold members through December 2014. More precisely, it requires an Xbox Fitness Pass, which is included free to Gold members. What happens after December, or what the Fitness Pass would cost non-Gold members, has yet been revealed.
The service provides interactive workouts with the famous names and brands listed above, among others. The new Kinect reads micro-fluctuations in your skin to track your pulse without even wearing a sensor, and it watches your movements to ensure proper form and evaluate your workout. Social Challenges pit you against your friends. Screenshots show something called "FP" ("Fitness Points" perhaps?) which seems like an analog to Gamerscore, but for sweating instead of shooting.
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