Skyward Fire

xbox 360 goodness by somberguy

For masses, E3 2009 started off with a bang set forth by the Microsoft keynote, the two biggest announcements of the same were Project Natal, and Metal Gear Solid coming to the Xbox 360. Project Natal is Microsoft’s very own Full Body 3D Motion Detection technology, that uses a 3D camera, and the SDK currently seems to support face recognition, voice recognition and fully body motion scanning in real-time. Project Natal is something straight out of what you might have seen in Minority Report, and the possibilities with this are endless. Check out the Keynote preview below.

The demo at the Keynote showed immense accuracy, specially while reading the limbs. But I have some major doubts regarding the same in my mind, which I’m sure the folks behind this are madly working to fix, most important of which is bringing down the manufacturing costs. Considering the fact that this is supposed to work with finger movement detection & detection of facial expressions of many people at the same time, the resolution and the processing capability needs to be massive. Come to think of it, finger detection is needs intense precision, and is very highly unlikely, at least for the time being.

Although, it’s just too early for this to hit the streets. With proper software backing, more hardware improvement & add-ons, and as mentioned before, bringing down the costs have a long way to go. For now, one can only say that demoing Project Natal was more of a marketing move. Being given the chance of opening up gaming’s most celebrated public events, Microsoft just had to overshadow competition, and build excitement & expectations that will be carried forward to E3 2010. And they’ve successfully done that. Gizmodo has a great gallery of the entire demonstration and a detailed report available here.