The recent Windows 10 update is breaking webcams
If you’ve installed the recently-released Windows 10 Anniversary Update and noticed your USB webcam is acting screwy, you’re not alone. It seems the decision to prevent them from using the popular MJPEG and H.264 encoding processes in favor of the NV12 and YUY2 formats is affecting far more devices than Microsoft anticipated, causing millions of cameras to crash.
Why restrict them? As Thurrott first pointed out, the Anniversary Update permits possible new situations wherein multiple applications access the webcam and the banned processes would duplicate the encoding stream, slowing it down. Limiting compression formats would seemingly prevent multiple simultaneous processes.
Unfortunately, that’s left a huge number of users in the lurch who use devices dependent on these formats, which are freezing shortly after turning on. They’ve brought their grievances to a developer forum, where “Mike M” on the Windows Camera team has explained their reasons for removing the formatting, but it seems like they underestimated the volume of folks who would be affected. The developer noted that a fix for the MJPEG issue would likely come in a September update, but the H.264 will likely take more time to address. If using a device with either of these encoding formats is crucial, you can roll back the Anniversary Update within 10 days of loading it, as PC World notes, but otherwise you’ll just have to wait for the Camera team to solve the issues.
When reached for comment, a Microsoft spokesperson gave the following:
Windows 10 continues to have the highest customer satisfaction of any version of Windows. We have seen a small number of reports of unexpected behaviors following the Windows 10 Anniversary Update. Engineering and customer support are investigating these on a case by case basis and offering trouble-shooting tips as necessary. If a customer has any issues, we offer customer support at http://www.microsoft.com/support.
Source: Thurrott
Beautiful indie game ‘Below’ is delayed once again
If you’re eager to play Super Time Force developer Capybara Games’ latest title, Below, you’re going to have to wait a bit longer. The atmospheric and ethereal indie game has been delayed once again, this time with no new release date. Below was originally supposed to come out this summer for Xbox One and PC, but Capy needs a little more time to make sure it meets the studio’s high standards.
Below was first revealed back in 2013 and was one of the first indie titles to be showcased for the Xbox One. Since then it’s had several different release dates, only to become another victim of the rising scourge of game delays.
Capybara is hardly the only victim. Kentucky Route Zero’s fourth chapter was finally released this month after the series took an unexpected three-year hiatus. More big budget titles are also being affected. Final Fantasy XV’s September 30th release date has been delayed to November, making it a little over 10 years since Square Enix first revealed it as a PlayStation 3 exclusive.
Developers should definitely take their time. Delays can often be a good thing as they allow game makers to make last minute improvements that can turn a broken game into a great experience. But it does raise the question: is announcing a game years before it’s close to being ready really a smart move?
Source: Capybara Games
Listen to Groove Music while you play ‘Forza’ on Xbox One
One of the cooler features from the Anniversary Update for Xbox One is Background Music. As the name implies, you can use music from practically any source as your soundtrack for a lot of different activities on the console. If you’re a fan of Groove Music, there’s an update rolling out that adds the service to the list of Background Music sources. It’s a feature that’s been available to folks in the Dashboard Preview Program for awhile, but Xbox’s Mike Ybarra says that the update, version 3.6.2395, will be available for everyone today.
Xbox owners: Groove on Xbox should support background music tonight/tomorrow for all users. Look for version 3.6.2395.
— ♏️ike Ybarra (@XboxQwik) August 18, 2016
Source: Mike Ybarra (Twitter), Microsoft
Kick Cancer’s ass and raise money for sick kids in ‘I, Hope’
Nazis, like zombies, are pretty much the perfect video game enemy because there are zero redeemable qualities about them. But those might have some competition now that there’s a game where you fight cancer. Not literally, but an enemy named “Cancer” an in the Xbox One’s forthcoming I, Hope from indie studio Arconyx. Lead developer Kenny Roy’s mission with the ID@Xbox project is to help kids who are actually battling cancer in hospitals around the world to have a cathartic, figurative way to do it as well. More than offering therapy to kids, when it goes on sale next year, 100 percent of the profits generated from the game will go toward helping kids with life-threatening illnesses and their families.
“As much as I love shoot ’em ups, big explosions and arcade experiences, I believe that games can be so much more,” Roy says in a post on Microsoft News Center. “There are real positive experiences to gain from gaming, and I wanted the public to experience that. With I, Hope, I want to move minds.” In the game, Cancer is an evil creature on the warpath of protagonist Hope’s home island. To defeat it, she has to travel through a quintet of floating islands gathering the tools she needs to defeat the foul beast.
Even by watching the work-in-progress trailer below, it’s pretty clear that /I, Hope/ is far different from another game the recently dealt with pediatric terminal illness, That Dragon Cancer. The latter is an autobiographical game about a family’s struggle with their child’s illness, whereas, as the name overtly suggests, I, Hope has a different perspective.
“I wanted to create a great game that was fun for everyone,” Roy says, “while still delivering a powerful, meaningful message to kids struggling in hospitals around the world.”
Source: Microsoft News Center
Tricking out your dragon in ‘Scalebound’
Scalebound is one of my most anticipated Xbox One games. It’s a classic Platinum title, mixing over-the-top, combo-heavy combat with a gargantuan dragon that’s willing to help you out in a pinch. Throw in a strange, luscious new world and some enormous, fantastical enemies, and you have a game that oozes both style and substance. Last year at Gamescom, Platinum founder Hideki Kamiya teased that players would be able to customize their dragons over the course of the campaign. Now, he’s explained exactly how that will work. And oh boy, am I excited.
For starters, there are three core dragon types to consider: the “rex,” a two-legged all-rounder that’s been shown in most of the trailers; a stout “tank” class that shuffles around on all fours; and a “wyvern” type that’s particularly agile in the air. As you battle through Draconis, you’ll pick up gems that can be spent on your dragon, Thuban, at designated shrines. You can pick a class and stick to a single track, accentuating its strengths and weakness, or choose to “morph” into one of the other two forms. As you upgrade and slowly shift toward the other two dragon type classes, you’ll build on Thuban’s existing stats with some vastly different attributes.
“The customization is so deep that you’re going to be able to create your own play style in a dragon.”
The idea is that you can fine-tune Thuban to fit your particular play style. You might want a tank-type dragon, but with a little more speed that’s usually reserved for the wyvern. Or a robust rex with some extra defensive capabilities pulled from the tank class. Each form has a trade-off — a thicker-skinned wyvern might be slower to attack, for instance — so the player is encouraged to continually adjust their build.
Video game designer Hideki Kamiya
“You’re welcome to go down one path and develop it in that way, but there are all these intermediary sort of states where you can create your own dragon,” Kamiya (speaking through an interpreter) told me at Gamescom. “That’s really where the fun lies. The customization is so deep that you’re going to be able to create your own play style in a dragon.”
The game’s human hero, Drew, shares his life force with Thuban. To inflict more damage, he can enter a “dragon form,” which covers his body in strange scales and a leathery, wing-like cape. Thuban has a similar “beserker” mode that can be activated periodically in combat. The nature of this form can be tweaked at the dragon shrine using unlockable “parts.” They’ll change the look of your dragon — Kamiya showed some examples that had sharper horns and claws. Most parts will inject your dragon with elemental qualities, allow you to deal more damage or inflict a temporary stun (an ice buff will freeze your opponent, for instance).
With your gems depleted, you’ll want to move onto armor. These sets are human-made and purchased with a currency that’s picked up from fleshy foes and completing side quests. Jean Pierre Kellams, creative producer at Platinum, said you’ll use these to “cover up” any remaining weaknesses that your dragon might have. Most are defense oriented, but a few will also have offensive capabilities, adding more complexity to your build.
More importantly, they look totally badass. The different armor styles include some samurai-inspired plates and a traditional, high-fantasy knight set. You can apply this armor to five different places on your dragon, and Platinum says you’re free to mix and match the parts. The downside is that armor will slowly degrade in combat. If you like a particular set, you’ll need to watch its durability and make repairs when necessary.
“We want to make a clean distinction,” Kellams explained. “Things that can break are human, and things that are permanent are this kind of organic dragon material.”
These customizations will be vital in combat. Platinum showed a new feature called “Dragon Link,” which allows Drew to temporarily control Thuban. The camera will stay behind Drew, however, with important commands linked to face-buttons. Knowing your dragon’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as its abilities in berserker mode, will allow you to stun and weaken enemies that would normally be too tough for Drew. To demonstrate, Kellams showed some gameplay footage of Thuban and Drew battling a large, gorilla-type enemy in a dungeon. The hero had to keep his distance and figure out when to activate Dragon Link — doing so leaves him vulnerable to attack, which can be devastating in later boss battles.
“The subtle, incremental shifts that you make between the three forms should ensure that your creature is unique.”
Dragon customizations will also play a role in co-op. At E3, the developer showed a trailer with four different heroes, flanked by their personal dragons, teaming up to take down a huge spider. Like a difficult raid in Destiny or World of Warcraft, your chances of success will improve if you have different dragon types. A wyvern can keep a boss occupied for instance, and aim for precise weak points, while a tank-type dragon takes the brunt of its most devastating attacks. Kellams says the game will ensure that you’re matched with players that have chosen a different path for their dragon. Even if you team up with friends, however, you should find variety in both your dragons and the way you play.
“It’s unlikely your three other friends are going to have the exact same dragon,” Kellams explained. The subtle, incremental shifts that you make between the three forms should ensure that your creature is unique. “If you happen to be identical twins with very similar interests — I suppose it’s possible to hit the scenario that you’re thinking of, but we want to make that a very, very rare case.”
There’s more to dragon customization, but Platinum is keeping the details a secret. That’s understandable, given Scalebound is still deep in development. (It was delayed in January and now has a tentative “2017” release date.) For now, I’m happy to dream about my perfect dragon, and envision myself flying into battle like Khaleesi from Game of Thrones.
We’re live all week from Cologne, Germany, for Gamescom 2016. Click here to catch up on all the news from the show.
Microsoft Launches OneNote Import Tool to Help Mac Users Transition From Evernote
Microsoft today announced the launch of its OneNote Import Tool for Mac, which is designed to allow Mac users to quickly and easily transfer all of their notes from note-taking app Evernote to Microsoft’s own note-taking app, OneNote.
Transitioning from Evernote to OneNote is as simple as downloading the import tool, letting the app locate Evernote notebooks, signing into your Microsoft account, and hitting the import button. From there, all of your Evernote content is available in OneNote.
Microsoft’s OneNote Import Tool is timely because Evernote recently made a policy change that has pushed users into seeking other note taking services. As of late June, customers who use a free Evernote basic account are only able to access their notes on a total of two devices. Accessing Evernote content on more than two devices now requires an Evernote subscription, priced at $3.99 per month or $34.99 per year.
OneNote requires notes to be stored using Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage service (which comes with 5GB free storage) but there are no restrictions on accessing notes across multiple devices. OneNote also offers many of the same features that are available in Evernote and it can serve as an alternative to Apple’s own Notes app.
OneNote lets you work the way you want. You can get your ideas down in a range of ways that include typing, inking, embedding videos, recording audio, or clipping web content. If you prefer to use paper and pen, you can even scan that content with OneNote to make it digital, searchable and available from your phone to your laptop. We’ve heard that many Evernote users rely heavily on their clipper. OneNote has a great clipper for all major browsers, available for free at OneNote.com/clipper.
Microsoft’s new OneNote Import Tool can be downloaded from the OneNote website for free.
Tags: Evernote, Microsoft, OneNote
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Parallels Desktop 12 for Mac Comes With Sierra Support, Standalone Toolbox App
Parallels today announced Parallels Desktop 12 for Mac with support for macOS Sierra and the addition of several new features. The company also announced a new standalone app called Parallel Toolbox, which allows users to perform some simple tasks that aren’t necessarily tied to visualization.
New features in Desktop 12 include having Windows 10 “always on” in the background, the ability to instantly launch Windows apps, the ability to schedule incremental backups and Windows updates, the ability to assign special behaviors to Windows apps, improved integration for Microsoft Edge, Outlook, and Office 365, and Xbox app support. Additionally, Parallels has partnered with Blizzard to provide specific support for the hit game Overwatch.
Version 12 also includes 90 percent faster snapshot creation, 60 percent faster suspension of VMs, 25 percent faster shared folder performance, 25 percent faster compilation of Visual Studio projects, and up to 10 percent in battery life improvements for “certain environments.”
The company is also touting a new standalone app called Parallel Toolbox. The Toolbox places a drop-down menu in the Mac’s menu bar, allowing users to do certain tasks quicker. Tasks include the ability to record the screen, take screenshots, record audio, archive files, convert video and download video, lock the screen and more.
Parallels Desktop 12 for Mac is $79.99, while Desktop 10 or 11 users may upgrade for $49.99. The Business and Pro Editions are also available with a subscription fee of $99.99 per year, although Parallels 10 and 11 users with perpetual licenses can upgrade for $49.99 per year. Parallels Toolbox can be purchased for $10 per year or will be included with your Parallels Desktop 12 license.
Parallels 10 and 11 users can upgrade now at the company’s website. New users can purchase Parallels 12 starting on August 23. Parallels Toolbox also launches August 23.
Related Roundup: macOS Sierra
Tags: Microsoft, Windows 10, Parallels 12
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How we trained AI to be sexist
You’d never know from Jacqueline Feldman’s background that she’d become a passionate proponent of gender equality for artificial intelligence. She went the dreamer’s route at college, attending Yale for English literature and writing. She prefers casual dresses and writing from the comfort of her Brooklyn apartment surrounded by books, where she has the option of climbing to the roof for cool air on sweltering nights.
But once Feldman was hired to write the personality of a chatbot for Kasisto, a startup that focuses on artificial intelligence software for banks, she became vocal about the importance of taking gender out of the identity equation. Under her watch, MyKai, the bot she was hired to craft a personality for, would be neither female nor male.
Feldman’s boss at Kasisto, Dror Oren, says the work the team has done with the bot made him more outspoken about the need for equality in tech than he’d have imagined going into the project, and he’s a self-proclaimed feminist to begin with. Now, he’s hyperaware of the differences between the personality of Kai and overly feminine answers inside similar products made by most large tech companies.
Kasisto is on to something. There’s Apple’s Siri, which the company occasionally promotes with titillating commercials reinforcing gender stereotypes, like the one where Jamie Foxx flirts with the female virtual assistant, asking if she has a crush on him. There’s Amazon’s Alexa, which the company introduced in a roll-out video featuring a “man of the house” explaining all of the feminized assistant’s functions, while his fictional wife asks one question and gets chastised for it. And then there’s Amy, a bot that schedules meetings via emails that’s made by x.ai. The company proclaims on its site that Amy is asked out about once a month, which the company says makes it “blush.”
Play with any of those products and you’ll find the same flirty attitude promoting the gender stereotypes that make equal-treatment folks irate. Ask it to marry you and Alexa will say, “Sorry, I’m not the marrying type” or “let’s just be friends” to date requests. If you ask Siri “Who’s your daddy?” it will answer “You are…” before asking to get back to work. Microsoft’s Cortana sassily replies, “Of all the questions you could have asked,” to come-ons, something feminists will tell you makes the bot complacent in its harassment.
Kai, on the other hand, will tell users via text to stop bothering it or say it’s time to get back to banking.
Sure, many of those other companies now have a male-voice option, but those aren’t the defaults in the US, and when producing commercials for those products, the female voice is the star of the show.
Feldman says all this sexualized AI can be harmful to society.
“Some of these female-gendered personalities have what are called Easter eggs programmed into them,” said Feldman. “These are supposed to be surprising moments in the interaction, and they’re often jokes that are somewhat demeaning to the personality speaking with you.”
She adds: “If you tried that conversation on a real woman, you’d really be bothering her.”
That’s not to say Easter eggs shouldn’t exist; they’re one of the delights of AI. But rather than demeaning through a typically sexist or flirty joke, Kai will make self-aware jokes about not being alive. If you text it goodbye, it may reply, “That is the X in the top right, right?” When asked if it believes in love, Kai will respond, “Love throws me for a loop. Unconditional love is an infinite loop,” which is a nod to what happens when computers freeze. These sorts of answers make Kai distinctly artificial, not human.
Women continue to earn 79 cents for every dollar a man earns, and it certainly wouldn’t hurt their standing in society if the tech world at least thought more carefully about gender in AI. The stereotypically ladylike, deferential responses of so many virtual assistants reinforce society’s subconscious link between women and servitude. The average person’s only interaction with AI may be a female voice that can’t quite say “no, stop that,” and that’s not OK.
Even those that avoid being overly feminized, like Google’s voice assistant, aren’t entirely gender-free. Google’s lacks a girls name, but still has a woman’s voice. Those in the field will often point to findings like those of now-deceased Stanford professor Clifford Nass, who said people prefer the sound of a woman’s voice to a man’s.
Kasisto was able to avoid some of these tech landmines because Kai’s personality has to be conveyed only by the written word. But the company isn’t buying the idea that society simply prefers a female voice as a reason to keep feminized personalities in a strictly assistant role. In fact, they say, mixing up gender in artificial intelligence in tech would be good for everyone. Companies are clearly thinking about it on some level; for example, in the UK and France, Siri defaults to a man’s voice, unlike the woman’s voice we hear in the US.
“I don’t want to sound pretentious around it, but I think they [ other companies ] need to think seriously about how they’re designing bots,” said Oren, Feldman’s boss and co-founder at Kasisto. “I feel that we’re putting Kasisto values out there. We want to feel proud with the way our bot interacts because it reflects our values as a company.”
Amazon and Google declined to comment for this story, and Apple didn’t respond to requests for an interview. Deborah Harrison, one of Microsoft’s personality writers for Cortana, says the team considered benefits to either gender when beginning to craft the personal assistant but settled on female because they felt women are perceived as being more helpful than men. Still, she said they felt the weight of their decisions.
“This industry — digital assistants and AI research — is in many ways in its infancy, so the interactions we design now will, for better or worse, begin to become standardized through familiarity,” Harrison said via email.
Dr. Olga Russakovsky, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon, was spurred to action by how tech treats women, period. She told Engadget she started a computer-science camp for girls called SAILORS while at Stanford because of the disproportionately low number of women in the field. In 2011, only 18 percent of bachelor’s degrees and 20 percent of doctoral degrees in computer and information sciences were earned by women.
When designing the camp program, she tailored it to how girls learn, as opposed to conventional programs that tend to favor boys. Part of the problem with sexism in artificial intelligence appears to be that there aren’t enough women involved in its creation.
Russakovsky applauds work by anyone in artificial intelligence who tries to create an environment that includes women as equal beings. This isn’t about an overly PC society getting its dander up over nothing. One study she cites found there is a hidden gender bias within a large sample of news text, randomly sampled, online. She worries these subservient values will grow more entrenched over time, keeping women underrepresented in her field.
It’s possible that some of the loudest criticism of personalities like Cortana (which was initially based on a nude video-game character) has had some effect at large tech companies. Apple added a male voice option to Siri in 2013, two years after Siri was introduced. And personal scheduling software company x.ai introduced a male option a year ago, after debuting with female-only Amy.
But even these maddeningly slow additions might do little to actually reverse sexism within the very DNA of artificial personalities.
Until more people in computer science ‘fess up to the problem of overly sexualized bots, we seem doomed to travel along the same rutted tracks of homogeneous design, with too few women involved in the development of our Siris, Amys, Cortanas and Alexas. That leaves the small teams at companies like Kasisto at the forefront, dragging AI into a more inclusive world. Here’s hoping their colleagues at larger companies wake up and do the same.
Microsoft says this might be the last console generation
Earlier today I sat down with Aaron Greenberg, Microsoft’s Head of Xbox Games Marketing, to talk about Xbox One, Project Scorpio and the future of console gaming. Here are Greenberg’s thoughts on three key topics.
On Project Scorpio-exclusive titles
At E3, Xbox head Phil Spencer said that all games and accessories will support all versions of the Xbox One, including Project Scorpio. I said at the time that this statement was not true, because only Project Scorpio will support a VR headset (an accessory), and there will definitely be VR-only games that only work with Project Scorpio. Greenberg shed some light on this, saying that the main reasoning behind Spencer making this point is that everything that works on Xbox One will work on Project Scorpio, rather than the other way around.
He added that while Microsoft is “not going to have console-exclusive games for Project Scorpio,” it doesn’t “think of [high-fidelity VR] as console gaming, and “VR experiences those will be new things that you will get on Project Scorpio.”
Here’s the full question and answer:
Q: Phil Spencer said that all accessories and all games work across all versions of the Xbox One. But he also said Project Scorpio is specifically the only Xbox that’s powerful enough to run VR. I don’t quite understand how those two statements can coexist.
Greenberg: “The idea was first, how can we innovate with hardware without sacrificing compatibility. Generally when you bring a new iteration of console hardware you lose compatibility with their games and accessories. So we’re saying, if you bought games and accessories for your Xbox One, or you buy an Xbox One S, those games and those accessories are going to work on Project Scorpio. When you think about backwards compatibility and our games lineup, we want gamers to know that when they’re ready to upgrade to Scorpio that content will go with them. That’s our promise and commitment around compatibility.
The next thing was ‘are you going to make games exclusively to Project Scorpio?’ And we said we’re not going to have console-exclusive games for Project Scorpio. It’s one ecosystem, whether you have an Xbox One S or Project Scorpio we don’t want anyone to be left behind, Now, with the power and capabilities we have we’ll be able to do high-fidelity VR. Now that space, we don’t think of that as console gaming ,we think of that as high-fidelity VR, and so with the VR experiences those will be new things that you will get on Project Scorpio.”
On the end of console generations
“The future of Xbox looks a lot like PC gaming.” That’s what Engadget editor Nathan Ingraham wrote after speaking with Phil Spencer earlier this year. Spencer spoke about wanting to see a steady stream of hardware innovation rather than seven-year gaps between consoles, citing the smartphone market as inspiration. Greenberg went one step further. In his opinion, this is the last console generation. “We think the future is without console generations,” he continued, explaining that Project Scorpio was a “big bet” that gamers will embrace that notion.
Q: The Xbox platform has moved forward to have such regular updates and new features coming all the time. It kind of seems like hardware is going the same way. There was a very short gap between the Xbox One and the Xbox One S, and we’re probably talking an even shorter gap before Project Scorpio. Do you see a future of console upgrades continually happening? Is this the last console generation?
Greenberg: “I think it is … For us, we think the future is without console generations, we think that the ability to build a library, a community, to be able to iterate with the hardware, we’re making a pretty big bet on that with Project Scorpio. We’re basically saying ‘this isn’t a new generation, everything you have continues forward and it works.’ We think of this as a family of devices.
But we’ll see, we’re going to learn from this, we’re going to see how that goes. So far I’d say based on the reaction there appears to be a lot of demand and interest around Project Scorpio, and we think it’s going to be a pretty big success. If the games and the content deliver, which I think they will do, I think it will change the way we think about the future of console gaming.”
On closing the gap between PlayStation 4 and Xbox One
Sony is “winning” this console generation, at least in sales. Microsoft hasn’t released any data in an age, but Sony passed 40 million sold months back while current estimates put Xbox One at around the 22 million mark. I asked Greenberg how Microsoft fixed that, and if it’s actually trying. He said that console sales were “really healthy,” and that more people were using Xbox One now than last year. A large focus for the company is in bringing the games to a bigger audience through Xbox Play Anywhere (a feature that lets you buy a game once and play on Xbox and PC), rather than just trying to sell new consoles.
Q: I was in [a company’s] briefing last week and they said by the end of the year you’d sell 29 million Xbox Ones versus 52 million PlayStation 4s. Obviously those are estimates, but the gap is there. How do you close that gap, and how focused are you on closing it versus just trying to make the 29 million Xbox gamers you do have happy?
Greenberg: “We’re focused on a few things. I’d say first we’re focused on growing the userbase of our games, bringing our games to as many gamers as possible, that’s why you see a lot of our big franchises on Windows 10. That allows more gamers than ever before to play titles like Gears of War, Forza Horizon, etc. From a console ecosystem standpoint, we’re seeing really healthy console sales really healthy engagement. Year-over-year for the month of July we saw Xbox One usage up 18 percent, so also really healthy.
Sony’s had a lot of success as well. I think what you’re seeing is that the console market is really healthy, console sales are doing really well in general, software sales are strong. It’s been a good industry for both of us, and we’re innovating in different ways. We’re innovating in a way where we know a lot of gamers are multi-device gamers, they don’t just buy one system, and so we want to be able to have the same types of experiences on Xbox Live, the same games, the same friends, both in the living room on their console or at work, on vacation or at school on their PC. You should be able to stay connected, and play the same games through things like Play Anywhere. That’s really been where we’ve been focused on.”
We’re live all week from Cologne, Germany for Gamescom 2016. Click here to catch up on all the news from the show.
Integrated Xbox Wireless is coming to future PCs and accessories
If you’re a serial Xbox One controller user, you’ve probably used it with your Windows PC at some point as well, whether to get in some Steam gaming or to make controlling any game a little simpler. Previously, doing so meant you’d have to have a special wireless dongle to do so.
Going forward, Microsoft plans on offering built-in Xbox Wireless, beginning with the Lenovo IdeaCentre Y710 Cube, which will support all Xbox One wireless accessories without he need for additional adapters or equipment.
The Lenovo PC is the first partner device to have built-in Xbox Wireless support, but it’s not going to be the last, according to Microsoft. Additional PCs and other accessories in the future will be supporting Xbox Wireless as they make their way to store shelves. This should make things a little easier for anyone looking to take their accessories beyond simple console usage.
Source: Xbox Wire
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