March 6^th, 2006 (2:54pm) - Up until now the only console users that have been able to enjoy a camera are those owning an Eye Toy for Playstation 2. Microsoft plans to change that however with the release of a camera for the Xbox 360. With the flawless chat capabilities 360 owners enjoy this would be a natural move, right?

Well steady reports have been made from an unknown source to Xbox360fanboy.com. The first of which have made mention of the cameras almost obivious ability to video chat with other camera owners. The unnamed developer has witnessed Microsoft employees using it for this very purpose.

Later after going to Microsoft for comment Kumar Banerjee, of the Microsoft hardware team sat down to give some hardware stats of the upcoming device. He mentions the device will be able to bag input at about thirty frames per second. For those that don’t speak game code, many video games implement this framerate, which tells us that the quality will be at least comparable to most webcams on the market.

Aside from talking about the aformentioned abilities Kumar went on to mention the ability to take stills (for gamercard and leaderboard purposes), low-light performance, and finally gesture-initiated gameplay.

The final and most exciting developments on the camera itself were at the recent XFEST event in Bellevue, WA in the past week. Do you like to create a custom character that looks like yourself only to be disappointed at the amount of time it takes? Well with the new camera for the Xbox 360 in less than 5 minutes you can have a fairly accurate facial scan in less than 5 minutes! Don’t believe me? Check out the photos down below taken from Fanboy’s annonymous source at the event itself and keep it locked on Gamersmark.com for more news on this great product.