“This is a pivotal moment that will bring with it a wave of change, the ripples of which will reach far beyond video games” – Steven Spielberg

So Nintendo introduced the world to motion based gaming with the introduction of the Wii. This revolutionized the gaming industry in a way that many thought was impossible. The Wii is so successful not because of its technical hardware capabilities, but because of its ability to get the whole family involved. This break with the stereotype of the gaming target market opens the way to the future for gaming companies.

This is where Microsoft comes in… Project Natal was announced last year and seems to be full of promise. For my part, I thought it looked more like a prototype, a prototype that would take years of fine-tuning. However, Microsoft is almost ready to release this game-changing breakthrough in late 2010.

So what is Project Natal and why is it so cool?

In the words of Microsoft, “it is a glimpse of a future where the Xbox 360 console is the centerpiece of any living room, and games, social interaction and communications are controlled with the movement of one hand.” Basically, Natal allows users to play games and interact with their Xbox with hand/body movements. This is a huge step forward for a console, as one of the main factors that non-gamers find so intimidating is the controller. The introduction of a more natural control system immediately opens the doors to a broader target market for Microsoft.

Project Natal is a small device that you plug into your Xbox 360. It has a video camera that tracks where your body is and what you’re doing with it. He also has a monochrome camera (using infrared) that has depth perception (determines how far away his body and components are) and a highly specialized microphone that can pick up voice commands. Along with all this hardware, you have a bunch of software that tells the Xbox how to find the various joints in your body (it tracks 48 of them), how to keep track of multiple players at the same time, how to tell your tie-dye T-shirt apart from the colored wallpaper behind you, and so on. Microsoft even did an acoustic study of living rooms, so Project Natal can tell when you’re talking, when your teammates are talking, and when someone in-game is talking, so it knows who to take voice commands from.

The resulting awesomeness is incredible, for example, when you approach your Xbox, it recognizes your facial features and automatically logs you into your gamer profile. There’s so much potential for Microsoft’s new toy! We have collected some examples that show how Natal can be used in the future.