After Xbox One was unveiled along with PlayStation 4 and Wii U, but the revelation has been somewhat rocky and pockmarked with numerous blows in the PR department. With the Xbox One, Microsoft has seen criticism about how the used game market with interact with their console (potentially with fees for customers, for retailers, for publishers?) that the console will require a 24-hour check in (and fortunately not an always-on DRM style.) Possibly seeing that this “social” attitude isn’t being taken well by gamers or gaming press, Microsoft felt the need to beef up the expectations in hardware.

Providing an answer to the speculation in the mind of gamers, Microsoft recently called a closed-door meeting called “Xbox 101“, the agenda: to reinforce the powerful nature of Xbox One.

According to Microsoft, Xbox One has the computational power of more than 10 Xbox 360 consoles, and this power becomes “infinite” with cloud technology, which game developers have been incredibly positive about.

The meeting was more of a demonstration, where Xbox One engineering manager Jeff Henshaw told about how Xbox One’s power has enabled Microsoft to create a demo using real data from NASA to track the orbital velocity of 40,000 asteroids in space.

“Microsoft has hundreds of thousands of servers and dozens of data centers geographically distributed all around the planet, and Xbox One has the ability to instantly tap in to that limitless computational horsepower. With that extra cloud power, Microsoft is able to take the number of asteroids from 40,000 to 330,000, and any device doing the computational math to realistically in real-time chart the orbital velocity of 330,000 asteroids would melt a hole in the ground, but Xbox One is able to do it without even breaking a sweat because it’s pulling in virtualized cloud computing resources,” Henshaw explained at the Xbox One demonstration.

Basically, Xbox 101meeting emphasized the importance of the cloud and gave a solid demonstration of cloud capabilities. According to Microsoft, there are over 500,000 updates per second coming from its global computing cloud down to this Xbox One and it seamless blends Xbox One’s incredible processing power with the limitless processing power of the cloud. Technically speaking, showing asteroids was something off the road for Microsoft, but it managed to connect it to the gaming world.

“Game developers are building games that have bigger levels than ever before. In fact, game developers can now create persistent worlds that encompass tens or hundreds of thousands of players without taxing any individual console, and those worlds that they built can be lusher and more vibrant than ever before because the cloud persists and is always there, always computing,” Henshaw said.

Besides cloud capabilities, there was a first-person shooter tech demo called Reflex that showed how developers can soup up their games with gesture- and voice-based commands.