Xbox 360 Gets Full Body Motion Control

At E3, Microsoft unveiled its interactive motion sensing system for Xbox 360 codenamed “Project Natal”. It has a full body motion control by tracking 3D movement and doesn’t require any controller.

Project Natal Xbox 360

Microsoft has not given the price and release date of project Natal. The sad part is Microsoft has said that they wont release this device in 2009. All we know now is its codename and what it will be doing in the future. Microsoft has said the new device will work with all the current, past and future versions of Xbox 360.

The Xbox 360 is a great machine. Hard-core gamers like it because it’s got decent graphics and a great online service and it’s developer-friendly, so there are lots of good games for it. But to compete seriously with the Wii, the Xbox has to expand outside the hard-core gaming scene too. It needs casual gamers, and that’s where it has a problem. Non-hard-core gamers have trouble using the Xbox controller. It has two joysticks, two triggers, two bumper buttons and a bunch of other buttons besides. It takes time to learn. Their little thumbs get all confused. The Wii isn’t like that: you just wave it like Harry Potter and you’re golden.

If it had really tried to, Microsoft probably could have come up with a decent knockoff of the Wii controller. But instead they — meaning Don Mattrick, the head of Microsoft’s interactive-entertainment division and the former head of Electronic Arts — decided that instead of imitating Nintendo, Microsoft would try to leapfrog past Nintendo. “We did explore whether we thought a motion-based controller was a true next step or a transition step,” Mattrick says. “And for us, we decided it was a transition step.” So about 18 months ago he started up Project Natal.

It has a video camera in it that tracks where your body is and what you’re doing with it. It also has a monochrome camera (it works with infrared) that reads depth — how far away your body and its component parts are — and a highly specialized microphone that can pick up voice commands. Along with all this hardware, it’s got a ton of software that tells the Xbox how to find your body’s various joints (it tracks 48 of them), how to keep track of multiple players at the same time, how to tell your Hawaiian shirt apart from the colorful 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 buddies are talking and when somebody in the game is talking, so it knows whom to take voice commands from.

Tags: Hands Free, Project Natal, Xbox 360