Games!!!

As I mentioned last week, E3 starts this week and Microsoft kicked it off yesterday with their press event. They showed several games that I'll have to have including Fable 3 and Gears of War 3 but the main thrust of their show was their motion control system, now called "Kinect"( formally Project Natal).

Microsoft seems to really be going after the Wii crowd with Kinect. All the games they showed looked like HD counter-parts to Wii games. I'm not sure that it's going to matter though. While they're going after the Wii crowd, I think it's pretty obvious that Kinect is something that goes beyond waving a controller around. The fact that there isn't a controller, just your body seems to come across very well.

I said it last year and I'm still saying it: What Microsoft is doing with interfaces with Kinect may be more important that what they're doing with games with Kinect. Being able to wave at the xbox to sign in, being able to navigate menus with the wave of a hand, being able to push buttons and so on and so on. All of it has huge applications outside of the Xbox. Put the Kinect cameras into TVs, Tivos, PCs and you have a whole new world of operating the devices that we use every day. And that's just with your hands. They've done what appears to be incredibly strong voice recognition so that you can say "Xbox ______" and it will likely do what you told the Xbox to do. Play, Pause, Stop and selection commands were all shown off to great effect. Again, I was just as excited last year about the interface capabilities as I was the games and the same is still very true this year. If Microsoft will license this technology to other companies, thing could get very interesting, very quickly.

Sony and Nintendo are up the next couple of days. For those of you who have no interest in this stuff, I know, I'm sorry, but this is probably what you can expect the next couple of blogs. Hand in there.

--Paul