[Update] Milo tech â??incubates across Microsoft studiosâ??

The corporate vice president of Microsoft Game Studios has suggested that the R&D undertaken with Lionhead’s Milo project will aid other studios.

Earlier today it had emerged that Microsoft may have repositioned Milo as a tech demo that will not materialise as a commercial product.

Yet Microsoft exec Phil Spencer suggested that many ideas and technologies found in Milo will be reborn in similar titles such as Frontier Developments’ Kinectamals.

"Milo and Kate, the technology is stuff that we’re still incubating back in the studios," Spencer said in an interview with Official Xbox Magazine.

"I think Lionhead has always been a great place, and the nice thing about Peter Molyneux as Creative Director in Europe is you start to see some of those ideas around Milo also showing up in other places,” he added, citing the Kinectimals project which is in development at Frontier.

The similarities between Kinectimals and Milo are immediately apparent – both titles ask users to interact with a highly-evolved AI program. Milo has a boy, Kinectimals has so far shown a pet tiger.

Said Spencer: "Molyneux being so close has actually been able to take many of the learnings that Lionhead has done and help other teams, and when you see the interaction between the girl and the animal [in Kinectimals] on stage you can see similarities to stuff we were working on with Milo, so we start with experiments and they may turn into games themselves."

Meanwhile, a Kotaku report has cited Xbox Live Group Manager Aaron Greenberg as saying: “Milo is a technology demo that continues to exist, but right now it’s not a game that we’re planning to bring to market.”

Last year Molyneux said that the technology was the culmination of "a twenty-year dream of mine".

Microsoft has declined to comment at the time of going to press.