The long anticipated and oft-speculated Project Natal has finally been revealed to the world at this year’s E3. Microsoft aim to not only change the way games can be played, but also the way we interact with our consoles, communicate with our friends, and consume our media. Several games were shown at the media briefing, we’ll cover those in a separate article. This piece will focus on the hardware and what it can do for non-game applications.

Kinect sports an RGB camera, a depth sensor, and a Microphone. All three of these are housed in one handy little unit. Using a combination of these three devices Kinect is able to track your body movements, your gestures, your facial expression and several other things as well. It is able to recognize multiple people at once, so one Kinect unit will allow an entire family to interact with it at the same time.

Your Kinect experience starts with you signing into the console. Just wave at the console, Kinect will give you a quick look and then sign you into your profile. You can then wave from right to left or left to right to navigate the existing dashboard. You can also wave the dashboard away and be taken to the Kinect Hub where you’re presented with all of the Xbox’s functions. If you want Netflix, all you have to do is gesture at it. Or, if you prefer, tell the Xbox what you want. Saying “Xbox” will tell Kinect that it should expect a voice command. From there you just need to say what you want. For example you could say “Xbox”, then “last fm” and Kinect would pull up last.fm

If you’re listening to music via last fm, you can gesture to the left or right to skip through tracks. You can also interact with the scrubber with your hand, queuing up a specific portion of a song or video. Telling the Xbox to Pause, Resume, or Stop will perform the appropriate action. If you want to watch a movie and don’t want to deal with a remote control than this will be an ideal solution.

UI Navigation is only a small part of what Kinect offers. One application that was shown off was the live video chat. Video chat isn’t anything new, but Kinect’s implementation of this feature is rather unique. For one thing, you never need to adjust the camera. Kinect is capable of face recognition so it will automatically follow you to keep you in frame. This is an interesting feature, and one that might be a little disconcerting to some.

Another nice feature of the video chat is the ability to watch media together. You can pull up a video which will show up between the two chat windows. Look at news stories, social updates, that sort of thing. All of that will be accessible without using a controller, using gestures and voice commands.

From what we have seen so far, Kinect is looking very impressive from a technical standpoint. There is still a lot that we do not know about it yet though. First and foremost on that list is the price. Some are speculating from $99 up to $199. Microsoft has not yet revealed the official pricing.

Beyond that, we also don’t know how well the voice recognition will work with anyone who has an accent. We hope that given Kinect’s international availability that Microsoft will have either developed or licensed some sophisticated technology for this part of Kinect’s functionality. The last thing anyone wants is someone telling their Xbox that they want to watch Transformers, and instead getting subjected to Transmorphers.

We’ll follow up this story with more information on the games and any other details that become available.

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About This Author: Filippo Dinolfo

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