A complete overview of Project Natal

November 4, 6:10 PMLas Cruces Xbox Live ExaminerDaniel Arrey

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Its confirmed. This little peripheral will revolutionize the industry.

Project Natal. The very name of it means relating to birth. But relating to the birth of what? According to Microsoft, the birth of the next-generation of home entertainment. Project Natal is Microsoft's ace up the sleeve, the ace that's going to help them win round 2 of the console wars.
Numerous executives for Microsoft have stated that they believe Natal will add at least ten more years to the Xbox 360s life. It comes out next year. They've predicted a fifteen year life span on this console, which is five years longer than Sony's Playstation 3.

Developer support for Natal is huge. Big name studios are already supporting it, such as Lionhead Studios, Rare, Ubisoft, and even the hugely famous Bungie Studios may incorporate Natal into it's upcoming Halo game, Halo: Reach.

What is Natal? Natal is an approximately 9-inc wide horizontal bar, positioned on a ball joint pivot and is designed to be placed above or below the television. You can see an excellent picture of it above and to the right. Natal is packing a RGB camera, depth sensor, a multi-array microphone, and a customer processor running proprietary software which allows for full body 3D motion capture, facial and vocal recognition. The multi-array microphone allows acoustic source localization as well as ambient noise suppression. The depth sensor contains an infrared projector combined with a monochrome CMOS sensor, which enables the senors to see in 3D under any ambient light conditions. The sensor's range is adjustable to your needs, and Natal even automatically adjusts the range based on gameplay and your local environment. The skeletal mapping technology maps 48 points on the human body, and depending on the distance, can even identify individual fingers.

Check out the video that introduced Natal at E3 2009.

As you can see, the technology looks quite promising. Here's a quick clip of Steven Spielberg endorsing Natal as, not reinventing the wheel, but removing the wheel altogether.

 Felicia day tries out Ricochet, a game that uses your entire body as the controller, and gives her impression below:

As you can see, Project Natal looks really fun. It's got something out there for everyone, including artists, check out the demonstration below:

 Last but not least for our clips of Natal demonstrations, is Peter Molyneux's Milo and Kate introduction. Milo is an artificial intelligence, that will learn, interact with you, display and recognize emotions, recognize your face and identify you by name, and much more. Background processes will download information from the internet about current events, and he may bring them up in conversation with you. Check out the demonstration of Milo, and hear Molyneux talk about it a bit:

The biggest thing though, is that this amazing new product caters to everyone. Whether you're a hardcore FPS fan, or just a fan of group entertainment games like 1 Vs. 100. Rare, a company that developed both Goldeneye, and Perfect Dark (among other games) is working on a top secret First Person Shooter project, with collaboration from Peter Molyneux. 

The future of entertainment looks good for Microsoft. I really feel sorry for Sony fans, especially seeing as how their motion control system is pictured below.As a coworker of mine said, "Is that what I think it is?" No, he wasn't referring to a controller....