Last week before the sad news of Steve Jobs death, Microsoft announced their partnership with various living room content providers. Under the deal, Comcast, HBO and Verizon will start streaming content on the Xbox. With this news, I think it safe to call Xbox as the Windows of the living room. Unlike Google TV and Apple TV, the Xbox (with Kinect and Windows Phone) is a more complete platform for living room entertainment. Fun family games, hardcore gaming, music & movie streaming and cable—that’s the 360 degrees of multimedia and entertainment.

Kinect’s voice and gesture control along with the soon-to-be-released Windows Phone app to control the TV via Xbox brings the much needed interaction overhaul from the button remotes we’ve all be using for the past two decades. In a patent filing I came across, Microsoft plans to give shopping the Kinect treatment. A while back Microsoft showed avatars of a group of friends sitting together and streaming a video, the friends were all their houses. The patent application titled Motion-based interactive shopping experience brings these elements together and a user controlled avatar will be able to interact with objects in the virtual world, much like how playing a game on Kinect is.

The patent appliction as some very interesting possibilities:

You shopping for yourself by trying out the clothes and seeing how you’d:

If you like to shop with a friend, two users can shop together:

If you want to buy furniture, Kinect will re-create a 3D model of your room and show you how the furniture will look like in your room!

Patent application