Project Natal

Year in and year out we see something new and innovative released at E3. This year we saw the announcement of Project Natal. What is the hype about this you may ask? Well it is the creation of a controller free environment; wait if there is no controllers how do we play you may ask well the purpose of Project Natal is to enable users to control and interact with the console through gestures, spoken words or presentation of images or objects.

The announcement at E3

The purpose of this is to bridge the gap between the current hardcore gamer base and everyone else. I mean honestly who wouldn’t want to play with a console that is this awesome and such an innovative input system. Some of the demos or ways in which this device has been used has been shown in various demos; ranging from using your hands as a steering in Burnout to skateboarding with your own skateboard design. The uses are very large to say the least, you can use it to control your Xbox Live character, facial recognition- use your face as a password.

Fighting at a whole new level.

Interaction with the console through the device. (Note she is not holding a controller but simply mimicking the movements.)

The device is a wide horizontal bar measuring approximately 23cm’s wide, thus meaning the device was designed to be placed above or below your video display. Now what is in this device that makes it so astounding, well it has RGB Camera, depth sensor, multi-array microphone and custom processor (obviously running their top secret software). The camera is obviously in place to capture movements and pictures if need be, next up the depth sensor is in place so that the device can determine what is the depth of a motion – I mean it doesn’t help if it got no depth just now you want to kick the ball and it passes it, the multi-array microphone is to encourage more group play enabling you to play as party and communicate over Live with much more ease and last but least the processor which will run the software that melds all these components together to enable it to recognize voice, capture images and read body motions.

The device seen here sitting under a video display.

Codename Natal??? Why did they choose such a name??? Did they visit S.A at one time??? No, this in following with Microsoft’s naming tradition wherein they choose cities as the codename. This is not the South African Natal if you were thinking, but instead it is the Brazilian city Natal as a tribute to Microsoft director Alex Kipman’s country of origin. The word was also chosen as it has its connotations regarding birth and since seeing this was a birth of a new device.

Do you have any ideas you would like to add? Visit their Youtube website.

Or pop in to their site and see what other people said about them.

Source: YouTube

Xbox.com