So the question my son had about the Xbox One, and I thought it was pretty goofy at the time, was whether you’d be able to hook up the PlayStation 4 to the Xbox One to play Killzone while taking advantage of the other features that come with the Xbox One. The word on the street was that it was technically possible due to the HDMI input of the Xbox One, but it would introduce significant lag. I asked Microsoft’s Jeff Henshaw if this was possible, and his answer surprised me.
“It is an extremely small lag that the human eye will not be able to perceive,” Henshaw said. So yes, it’s going to be very possible to play the PlayStation 4 using the Xbox One, and the lag, according to Microsoft’s engineer, will be very hard to detect. You could also hook up a Wii U and play the new Mario game, and then use voice commands to put that in the background and switch over to an Xbox One game without changing inputs.
It’s fun to make someone from Microsoft squirm a bit by asking these questions. So I can play games using a competitor’s console while using all these neat Xbox One features? “Um, you could,” Henshaw said, and he pauses the game to think about the answer. “If it puts out HDMI, it’ll work just great.”
In fact, he said, this is the way he and his son play Xbox 360 games at home; they have the system hooked up via the Xbox One so they can have fun with the new UI and still play Xbox 360 games. So he’s not speaking hypothetically, this is a working feature.
So your PlayStation 4 will work just fine through the Xbox One. You can keep your Wii U hooked up through your shiny new Microsoft console to play those first-party games and then take a call via Skype. If you put in an Xbox 360 you’ll be able to see a little Xbox 360 dashboard inside the Xbox One dashboard. Henshaw is mostly comfortable talking about using the Xbox One to drive the Xbox 360, but he admits that anyone else’s console will work.
“You can extrapolate whatever you want! “ he said with a laugh “Whatever you want to hear!”
This is pretty cool, and when both systems arrive it’s going to be an interesting experiment to use the PlayStation 4 UI from within the Xbox One’s UI. What a strange world in which we live.
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