Today, Matt Hickey writing for The Daily.com is reporting that he’s received confirmation from Microsoft that previously viewed Asus Netbook prototypes are in fact using Microsoft Kinect technology!

See Matt’s Article here.

In my opinion, this is fairly big news and puts Microsoft in direct competition with the likes of PointGrab, EyeSight, and XTR3D. These companies have been heavily marketing their software solutions that work with built-in laptop web-cams to provide Gesture Recognition interfaces.

This seemed a bit ironic to me that these prototypes were actually Asus devices. You probably recall in my company profile of PointGrab that they had a promotion with Asus which allowed EMEA buyers of the companies Zenbook Ultrabook to download PointGrab’s gesture recognition software free of charge.

Check Asus out hedging their bets! Smart Move.