(Pre) Natal

Last week the gif+d invited me to tag along to attend a preview event for Microsoft Xbox 360′s forthcoming “Project Natal“, which is the code name for their “controller-free gaming and entertainment experience”. (Thanks for taking me Sam!) I was super-psyched to have the opportunity to witness it up close since I’ve been hearing and seeing all the hype surrounding it.

For those of you familiar, you already know. For those who don’t, simply put it’s Xbox throwing their hat in the ring against Nintendo’s Wii in an attempt to broaden their audience beyond the hardcore gamer. After seeing it live, it looks like “Project Natal” will easily accomplish that goal and could quite possibly be considered Microsoft’s game changer. This device will not only revolutionize how people interact with video games, but could also be considered a ‘peek’ into the future of how we’ll interact with computers.

Before I go into explaining “Project Natal”, kudos goes out to Microsoft and the planning team for this event. The gift bag included the Xbox 360-branded Flip Mino HD Cam you see pictured above, which I thought was a brilliant idea in giving guests the opportunity to engage with the product as well as document and promote it with ‘user-generated’ content.

As you can see from the picture above, “Project Natal” is an add-on peripheral camera/sensor that can detect everything from a person’s face, voice and body. Whether a male or female stood in front of the sensor and began to test the demo, the camera identified, and on-screen there was proper avatar representation. It was too noisy to check out it’s voice recognition capabilities, but all guests were able to test the interactive game play with a ‘dodgeball-like’ demo. As each took their turns, the sensor recognized their movements, and those same movements were emulated and performed by the avatar in-game. You wave your hand, the avatar waves. You kick, it kicks. You duck, it ducks. Some felt that the motion detection wasn’t perfect, but reps mentioned that it was an early version and they just wanted to show how the technology works, but from what I saw, it was good enough to see the future. My words obviously aren’t going to properly describe how much fun the “Project Natal” experience really is, but you can check this video footage I took of our friend Sean messing around with it doing his best rendition of “America’s Next Best Dance Crew”:

I apologize for the low-quality video, but hopefully you’ll get the gist of “Project Natal” and why there is strong opinion that it will change the face of gaming. I know I said interactive computing too, but think about it, this device recognizes you, just think of all the possibilities. Technology keeps innovating as far ‘into the future’ as our imagination takes us and Microsoft seems to have their hands on something that just might take us there.