With E3 Over, Video Games Will Get You Off the Couch
The hustle and bustle in Los Angeles is over for this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) trade show, which closed Thursday, and the future of video gaming can be summarized with one word: Motion.
After letting Nintendo’s Wii have most of the motion-sensing fun for some time with its revolutionary motion-detecting sensor, this year Microsoft and Sony showed their own initiatives to get players moving.
‘Make the Controller Disappear’
Microsoft’s innovation was introduced by movie director Stephen Spielberg, who proclaimed that interactive entertainment’s next step is “to make the controller disappear.” Microsoft’s Project Natal — pronounced “nuh-tall” — uses speech and facial recognition,
along with navigation by bodily motion, for game control.
The system combines a RGB camera, a depth sensor, a multi-array microphone, and a custom processor running proprietary software. It is compatible with any Xbox 360 system.
“It can recognize you just by looking at your face,” Microsoft said, “and it doesn’t just react to key words, but understands what you’re saying.” And, again following Nintendo’s lead of including the family, Microsoft set the bar for using its system quite low. “If you know how to move your hands, shake your hips, or speak, you and your friends can jump into the fun.”
“Clearly,” said Michael Gartenberg, a vice president at Interpret, “Nintendo’s success with the Wii has resonated with the industry.” He added that, if Project Natal “can be delivered to the market in a timely fashion,” it could be “potentially a huge thing.”
Nintendo, which began the motion craze, previewed its soon-to-be-released Wii Motion Plus, which enables smaller hand motions and better targeting for players. It is also continuing to expand the Wii into new directions with, for instance, the Wii Vitality Sensor, which detects the pulse in your finger and could be used for relaxation feedback — or, as Nintendo’s president suggested to…
Related posts:
