Sunday, November 22, 2009

Project Natal

Because I was talking about it tonight and we were playing the Wii... here's the youtube video for project Natal... this is coming out summer 2010 (they think); and it's some crazy stuff.

This is the crap that people wrote about in the 60's.. about how the year 2000 was going to be.

Voice Recognition
Facial / Body recognition
No Controlers
Sophisticated, Learning and Adapting Artificial Intelligence.

The first video is the promo vid for Natal.. this isn't the presentation that Lion Head Studios demonstrated the full under-the-hood horsepower of Natal (... that's Video #2). This is just the simple, over-the-top view of how Natal is going to change gaming and bring it in to a whole new audience.

With Huge.. **huge** studios chomping at the bits to get at Natal's source code.. big developers like Activision (World of Warcraft), BioWare (Fallout 3 / Dragon Age Origins), Electronic Arts (EA Sports Titles + Gears of War), Lionhead Studios (Oblivion)... with developers like this getting a hold of this technology; they'll be able to further the line where Nintendo and the Wii left off. Remove the 'clumsiness' of a controller from the mix; remove that boundary that prohibits so many from gaming, and open up the genre to even more people that it currently is enjoyed by...
Anyways, I'm very excited about this...this has the potential to be THE innovation in entertainment; potentially the largest innovation since color television; if it's really bought into by the industry and public:

Video #1:


And here's the full E3 presentation with Lionhead Studio's Milo AI:



that's all *real* stuff that's going into living rooms next year. I mean... voice recognition and facial recognition technology has been around for years in security equipment; but its so unreliable and dated.

But Natal's speed of recognition, facial expression reading, voice inflection recognition.. its just all brilliantly swift. If they can get buy in on this... you'll see and Xbox in 80% of all households.

2 comments:

martha said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Robert McCall said...

I was just wandering through the blogs when I came across this. This has to be the biggest thing in technology EVER! I can't believe I haven't been informed about this, me, a gamer! Thank you for filling me in with a great article. This technology won't just revolutionize entertainment, but it can be applied to almost anything in life. If this comes out this year, we'll see one in every home, *controlling* every home, within 10. A rather overwhelming thought, to be sure.