Project Natal and the Future of Gaming

by The Acagamic

Microsoft’s press con­fer­ence on this year’s E3 is just over and they have, of course, posi­tioned their box as an all­round enter­tain­ment plat­form, incor­po­rat­ing pos­si­ble com­pet­i­tive online media (like social media plat­forms Twitter and Facebook) and offline pas­sive enter­tain­ment (music from last.fm, movies from net­flix). But, the largest announce­ment was prob­a­bly the long-awaited full body motion sen­sor, nick­named “Project Natal” (or con­troller­less game inter­ac­tion).

Now, as recently men­tioned here, there was panel on Exergaming at this year’s Future Play con­fer­ence, where sci­en­tists pre­sented things like a full body inter­ac­tion kung fu game, which was con­ceived in a lab. Thus, see­ing Microsoft pick full body inter­ac­tion for games is some­what mag­i­cal as it shows the direct impact HCI game research can have on the indus­try (at least the way I see it, there must be a connection).

What could be seen from Project Natal so far is that it is an addi­tional hard­ware device that will work with Xbox 360 (and future mod­els). We could see fea­tures like full body move­ment recog­ni­tion, facial recog­ni­tion, voice recog­ni­tion, which of course raises the ques­tion whether the bio­met­ric data is also stored some­where on the box or even added to your live pro­file (since it allows log­ging into your account by rec­og­niz­ing you). But pri­vacy con­scious­ness aside, the main appli­ca­tion areas for this new, prob­a­bly (infrared and) camera-based device seem to be exergames (as the demon­strated dodgeball-style game Ricochet will make you jump around like you have been spend­ing the night in a bee­hive), but also cre­ative appli­ca­tions like the Pollock-style paint­ing appli­ca­tion Paint Party, which lets you use paint a can­vas by squirt­ing paint on it.

Microsoft cur­rently calls this true inter­ac­tion, but given its cam­era recog­ni­tion algo­rithms, it could pos­si­bly also allow for some biofeed­back magic by doing face recog­ni­tion. Peter Molyneux touched on this sub­ject in his very own pre­sen­ta­tion of Project Natal, where he intro­duced a vir­tual char­ac­ter that inter­acts nat­u­rally with the player. Since it is per­fectly pos­si­ble to rec­og­nize human emo­tions with a high-resolution cam­era (and the right room light­ing), I am wait­ing for the first game to try this out with Project Natal. Maybe our research is not so far away from the real­ity as we some­times think and biofeed­back games are just wait­ing around the cor­ner being the next big thing to hap­pen at E3 in 3 years. In any way, it will be inter­est­ing to try out Project Natal and see how it deliv­ers in the liv­ing room!
:)

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