Whistler Dream Accommodations

August 29, 2009

The Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) celebrates its 15th anniversary next week, and to kick it all off Microsoft is holding an entire event on Sunday evening just for its Natal gaming peripheral. That in itself is quite telling, considering Microsoft is spending another few hours the next day with its "real" E3 press event.

So what's the big deal with Natal? Well, in short, it's a big adrenaline shot going into the heart of the Xbox 360 at a time when consoles of yesteryear would be close to obsolescence. The once-standard, four- to five-year cycle for consoles has given way to the 10-year cycle--something Sony pioneered with the PlayStation 2, which remains the best-selling console of all time, and is still having new games made for it.

This new, 10-year cycle ends up benefiting hardware makers who are able to develop cheaper, better hardware; developers who can more easily create games that fully utilize the system hardware; and end users who can stick with the same platform and not have to worry about having to upgrade. This last part though, is where Natal comes in. Just two months ago Microsoft announced that it had sold a total of 40 million Xbox 360s worldwide, but more recent numbers from the NPD Group show that to be slowing. Part of that, no doubt, is due to a price cut and redesign of the PlayStation 3 system from Sonyin August that has brought a resurgence in sales.

The answer to any waning interest then is Natal, which promises to bring an entirely new gaming experiences to both a platform and hardware that's nearing its sixth birthday. In short, it may be just be a fancy video camera, but it represents the direction Microsoft intends to take the console for the next four (or more) years.

Let's take a look at some of the things Natal is bringing to the Xbox platform:

Freedom from controllers
(Credit: Microsoft)

Natal's biggest draw is that it can be plugged into your current Xbox 360 hardware and add new gameplay experiences, many of which can replace the need for traditional hardware controllers.

Some of the early demos from Microsoft at previous events (as well as our early hands-on) included a painting game where players could interact with buckets of paint and a canvas, to driving a race car with just your hands--as if they were on a virtual steering wheel. This is a remarkably different approach from existing free-movement control schemes by Nintendo and Sony, which utilize hardware controllers that have built in accelerometers and gyroscope sensors to determine what a player is doing with their body.

To Sony's credit, which is launching a hardware-based motion controller this Fall, the company helped pioneer this idea with the EyeToy camera peripheral, and subsequent PlayStation Eye successor. Microsoft even tried its hand at such a product earlier on in the Xbox 360's life cycle called Live Vision, though developer support for it was scant.

What those three never did though, and what Natal is promising to bring to the table, is the constant mapping of 48 skeletal points of a human body. This translates to bringing a very high degree of accuracy to how the hardware can perceive movement, right down to your fingertips. Apply that to an otherwise complicated control scheme and you get an entirely new control paradigm that can change--or be the same, from game to game. Look at something like the multitouch gestures found on Apple's portable devices and notebook computers and you get the picture of how big a change this can have on the games themselves.