Microsoft’s Project Natal

You Tube Video Microsoft's Project Natal

This video was released just last week, but is another example of the Xbox 360 project Natal.  I don’t know about anyone else in the industry, but the more I look at the capabilities of this technology the more super stoked I get about developing and playing games on it.  I certainly hope that the interface works as well as they show in the videos.  I know that a lot of times companies show stuff off in very limited environments that might not directly reflect the real world user.  For example, in the videos people talk to Natal and it responds flawlessly with its voice recognition.  However, I wonder if those people had to train it with hours of reading text in so the system could understand specific voice patterns.  What I mean is that Vista and Windows 7 have voice recognition, but sometimes the program is a complete dumb ass at understanding what you are saying.  Even after all the training exercises I can’t get mine to be usable enough to just speak and write an email.  So I wonder if Natal has completely new technology.

I am also a tiny bit skeptical because according to Wikipedia, Nintendo was offered this technology and declined it.  So they either didn’t have a clue what they were looking at, are fat dumb and happy with what they have, or it was really bad and Microsoft has fixed it.  Anyhow, I cannot wait for it to come out fourth quarter of this year.

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