I'll take a guess at MS' plans for Xbox. By 2022 I forsee Surface becoming the new Xbox. The two will be fully converged, by that time, Kinect, PC, and Games will all be served through a single device. They will figure out a method in which the surface can easily sync up with any TV it is beside, be it through a cable or a docking station or wireless. Controllers will still be around, touchscreen will not replace traditional methods of input yet.
VR will not fly, unless I see eye tracking technology coming soon, it's a pure vomit fest. Your eyes can't roam the VR and when you turn your head you naturally move your eyes before your head so, things are often incorrectly out of focus when you need them to be. The engine tries to guess where you are looking (but that's usually at the reticle)
I'm an owner of the Oculus kickstarter, 10 minutes of usage produces a near 5 hrs of headache. I'm fairly good with shooters, and I agree that not everyone is affected in the same way. On the official boards I've had people cite articles that Asians tend to get sicker easier. Well I'm not going to be less Asian anytime soon, so they better figure it out or I'm never going to buy into 3D VR gaming. It being used for 3D movies though, that's pretty bad ass.
Reality is, you have no idea how you are affected by VR googles until you try it. You can force yourself to get used to it, but it's a super jarring experience. You can't convince me to pay $600 for a VR console with headset that I can't play longer than 10 minutes before headache city. And by headache city I'm including nausea. That being said it's the best 3D I've ever had experience despite the fact that I feel like i"m looking through a fly screen when doing it. Wearing glasses is also a small problem btw, it's not easy to pass a headset around, each person must calibrate the vision to their own eyes and that takes time as well... anyway... that was OT rant.
More focus to online processing, could be a fairly powerful CPU/GPU as the world improves on both battery technology and power requirement running life maybe about 9 hours without charge. There will be an improvement to the GPU, but will be relatively middle of the pack like this generation, but will have additional fixed function co-processors (ie hybrid Ray Tracer in the PowerVR). I believe that the current move to compute shaders will drastically change the way these GPUs are loaded/engineered in the future and how games will render. Having tons of available bandwidth will become a massive requirement, so I believe the HBM chip stacking will be present. I don't know if embedded RAM will stick around, maybe it will, maybe it works good with compute, who knows.
