It will take ages for the system to become available and I'll be amazed if it works as seamlessly as depicted. It would be very exciting to see good voice and face recognition.

Clearly the main idea is to make inroads into the Wii audience who are completely oblivious to the 360.

It will be very interesting if this add-on will work with the 360 or is eventually integrated with it's successor. I'd bet on a new console since if the temptation is to leave it on a quiet and power efficient device would be preferable.

They'll keep the existing controller (btw making them compatible with the next console would be smart) and use this for system control and Wii-style games. I definitely can't see anyone playing a racer with their hands held up for several minutes though.

I call utter and complete bullshit on this one.

The Wii controller is so fucking wonkey, there is no way that something like this, that has layers of complexity over the Wii concept, can work as well as what they are implying in the video...

Hell, I'm gonna venture a *lies on this one.

Adding video to channels (Lies) - requested by ponceleon.

And yes, I'm upvoting because it is amusing to see marketing run amok like this.

^One thing that amused me from the E3 presentation is the Facebook and Twitter integration. Seems a bit bandwagon-ish.

It is possible.

Cars have good voice recognition. My acura tl does a good job. Most cars nowadays have the handsfree stuff.

The camera is a depth-based camera, not your traditional 2-D Eye Toy technology. With this type of camera, you can pretty much scan anything with accurate detail, including the face.

It is interesting. I would probably get tired doing the skateboarding thing. But I imaging a variation of rock band would be fun..

Based on this cnet article the system is confirmed as an addon for the 360

Microsoft Xbox Senior Vice President Don Mattrick did state that Project Natal would be compatible with every Xbox 360. But he didn't address how much it would cost, or whether it would be backward compatible with older Xbox 360 games. And afterward, Microsoft could not provide any additional details about the technology.

On-stage at E3, Mattrick said that the Project Natal software development kits had just gone out. This means that while most of the video game world is in Los Angeles this week for the show, few people have had a chance to see it.

One who did get a sneak peek at Natal is Epic Games Design Director Cliff Bleszinski, the visionary behind "Gears of War."

"I had a chance to be hands-on with (Natal) a couple weeks ago," Bleszinski told CNET News, "and it was damned fun." But even Bleszinski said he hadn't gotten his hands on a SDK yet, and wasn't able to say anything about the development process.

I hope this works for the sheer depreciatory amusement of seeing someone act out a raging Godzilla replete with the hearty roar in their living room.

I disagree Spoco... as far as gaming is concerned, the Wii turned out to be a gimick. While it sold like crazy, name what games are being talked about these days for the Wii... not much really. While it was new and innovative in ideas, the execution cannot match the accuracy and fact it, fun, of playing with a regular controller.

^ponceleon : Indeed there are issues with the vast majority of Wii games being gimicky collections of mini games, but real enjoyable ones like BoomBlox, Resident Evil 4, Super Smash Brothers etc. are all great fun on it. The lack of real graphical power hurts it somewhat as it's hard to do a real hardcore FPS with it without it looking old, but the controls lend themselves very well to the genre (the upcoming Conduit looks excellent).

While some of the things shown here will end up not being that practical (like fighting games being not quite responsive enough etc. )I think the real beauty of this if it works are the recognition of the player... I find the switching of Miis very annoying, so having it just recognise you would be awesome.

And being able to control your movie collection with voice and gesture control would probably be a whole lot more intuitive for my relatives to handle rather than knowing which buttons to press on my universal remote too.

I'm sure they could have thought of some better family activity than "Pit Stop: The Game."

>> ^Fjnbk:
I'm sure they could have thought of some better family activity than "Pit Stop: The Game."


My question for that part of the video was "how the hell is she controlling speed?" surely it's not sensitive enough to see her move her feet up and down... if so... nice... but I can't see how.

Hmm, is it possible to now... *findthumb?

A different thumbnail image for this video could not be found for findthumb request by spoco2.

No controller... but a special suit with ping-pong balls on it? We'll see...

Further thoughts - this is clearly about making the 360 the centre of the living room experience for all kinds of media. Now if they can make inroads into seriously good voice recognition and have a console that wakes up when needed then it will become a seamless part of the everyday experience. You'll forget about every operating it with a controller/remote for tasks like buying a game, playing a movie or listening to music.

But what they're missing is access to the web. If you could get websites to present a version optimised for voice and motion control you could have something quite amazing.

I pretty much wrote Natal off until they showed what Lionhead had done with it.

http://www.videosift.com/video/E3-2009-Project-Natal-Lionhead-Milo-Project

I foresee lots of new YouTube videos featuring TV sets being broken in new and hilarious ways.

As incredibly cool as this is, and as great fun as it can be, you'll still need controllers for some things. How would you walk forward/back, shoot etc. in a FPS without some sort of ridiculous movements, it's not like you can keep walking towards the screen indefinitely. Still, this combined with simple wireless controllers (no motion sensing required in them, just an analogue stick and/or buttons) and you've got a pretty darn fine experience.

Did you see the Sony conference, and their motion control prototype?

http://www.videosift.com/video/E3-2009-Playstation-Motion-Control-Prototype

They felt the same way about the need to have a controller in your hand. I dig it.

You can't compare the success of the Wii to this.

The Wii is a severely crippled console compared to Xbox and PS3. Developers have an increasingly difficult time developing good looking games for it. 90% of the artistic style of Wii games have to do with the lack of any real shader support on the GPU. Anything more than that would tank the framerate.