Xbox One can run without the Kinect sensor being connected

Microsoft’s Marc Whitten has revealed that the Xbox One won’t require the Kinect sensor to run. In a Q&A session with IGN, Whitten stated that like online, the Xbox One can run just fine without the Kinect being connected, but understandably, players won’t be able to use the Kinect-specific features of the console.

It can run just fine without the Kinect

"You have the ability to completely turn the sensor off in your settings," Whitten said. "When in this mode, the sensor is not collecting any information. Any functionality that relies on voice, video, gesture or more won't work. We still support using it for IR blasting in this mode. You can turn the sensor back on at any time through settings, and if you enter into a required Kinect experience (like Kinect Sports Rivals for instance), you'll get a message asking if you want to turn the sensor back on in order to continue."

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A bit later, Microsoft Senior Director of Product Planning Albert Penello took to gaming forum NeoGAF and shed some more light on the Kinect. In a question asking if an Xbox One user will be out of luck if their Kinect somehow broke, Penello stated that Microsoft wants users to be comfortable with the Kinect, and hence have added a bunch of extra privacy options in the console settings.

"We also have a ton of privacy settings to allow people to turn off the camera, or microphones, or put it in a state just for 'Xbox On' and IR blasting — there will be a lot of user control for that," Penello wrote.

"The thing we all understood, and hence this change, is that there are some scenarios where people just may not be comfortable," he wrote. "We wanted people to be 100 percent comfortable, so we allow the sensor to be unplugged. And clearly the 'it dropped' scenario is possible."