Project Natal: The Future Of Gaming
In the beginning the controller was wired -- and it was good. Then it became wireless -- even better. Now it’s gone. Puff! Totally awesome. The days of the burdensome hand-held gaming controller are finally numbered. Last Monday, at E3 2009, Microsoft unveiled their closely guarded secret and introduced the world to Project Natal, an audio and facial recognition technology, which makes hand-held controllers look like they belong in a museum. “The next step in interactive entertainment is to make the controller disappear,” said Hollywood film director Steven Spielberg, who unveiled the new technology at E3, the annual video game show at which console makers and publishers reveal their latest creations for the coming year.
The first thing I did when the news broke was rush to my son -- who’s seven and an Xbox 360 addict -- to tell him the fantastic news. I thought it was necessary -- not that he needed it - to give him a quick history lesson on the technological progression from the stone age wired controllers to the present time where quite literally, our bodies and voices are about to be transmogrified into controllers. “We become the controller” I repeated to him, more for my benefit than his. I thought he wouldn’t get it, but the ramifications of project Natal left him wide eyed with wonderment and he grasped the principle with the dead-on conifidence typical of the Google generation.
Project Natal, no doubt, is the most exciting technological development to hit the gaming industry in the post wii-remote era. Ninetendo, all credit to them, were the first to wow the world with their interactive cordless wii remote that let players interact with their games on a completely new level. Now, Microsoft, through Natal, has just floored the accelerator and promises to do to the Wii remote what colour television did to black and white TVs in the 70s. The gulf between both platforms is very wide.
Natal’s camera scans your body, tracks your movements, and recognises your facial expressions, voice commands and even tonal variations, immersing the player into the gaming environment in a technologically unprecedented manner. Imagine, racing sports cars with an imaginary steering wheel, or having a conversation and sharing hand drawn pictures with a virtual avatar or dipping your hand into a pond, all on your high definition flatscreen, just by making hand movements.
Almost sounds too good to be true. Microsoft no doubt, will be working day and night to get Natal onto the shelves sooner than later. Some industry analysts believe it will take about a year for Microsoft to roll out the technology. What we do know is that deals have been signed with social network sites Facebook and twitter and Natal kits have been distributed to all the major game developers.
Of course, this leaves us with one hanging question in the air: When we become fed-up with several generations of controller-free camera sensing technology, what will better it?
Maybe at that point, we’ll be ready for the next stage -- upgrading the human brain for fully immersive virtual reality where we’ll be able to live inside the game. (Read Upgrading The Human Body For Immortality, The End of Hardware, 3rd Edition: Augmented Reality and Beyond
Links: 3dvSystems, E3 2009: Is Microsoft’s Natal system the future of gaming?, Microsoft Whacks The Wii -- A First Look
