This week sees the return of E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo — a week-long maelstrom of the latest and greatest videogames and videogame technologies soon to be released to public, usually in time for Christmas.
E3 is set in the heart of downtown Los Angeles and has a fearsome reputation as being one of the most punishing of any technology industry events. But E3 can also claim to be one of the most defining points of its industry; a fulcrum around which multi-billion dollar businesses time their announcements and officially reveal their latest products.
This year’s E3 is expected to be no different. In fact, this year – after a spell of disappointments, and even the outright cancellation of the show a couple of years back (for a drastic rethink of its format) – promises to show some of the most exciting technology any consumer has yet seen.
Chief amongst these is Microsoft’s motion-based Project Natal, which has since been officially renamed Kinect. In essence, Kinect is an add-on for the current Microsoft Xbox 360. Inside Kinect are small cameras that detect movement – specifically human movement – in front of the device and relay this back to the Xbox. Games designers can then use this information within their games to change what happens on screen.
Recently, only fairly rudimentary demonstrations have appeared — such as players hopping about in front of their TVs trying to block footballs from entering a goal. But when Microsoft first introduced the original Project Natal prototypes, they demonstrated what appeared to be an incredibly advanced Human-Computer Interaction simulator, called Project Milo.
Project Milo was developed in conjunction with British computer games designer extrodinaire Peter Molyneux, and his team of designers and engineers at Lionhead Studios in Guildford, England. The Project Milo demonstration centred around a computer-generated boy – the titular Milo – with whom the player could converse and interact with simply by standing in front of their TV.
Whilst the ideas captured by Project Milo are certainly exciting, my feeling is that Microsoft Kinect isn’t going to provide these sorts of experiences for the consumer outside of PR videos and carefully controlled press demonstrations. But that’s not to say it won’t happen, or that it won’t be fun however Kinect eventually plays in your living room.
Nintendo Wii has been a massive success, despite the arguably shallow and disposable nature of the vast majority of its software. The reason for this success is simplicity; Wii still relies on a controller, but this controller is no more intimidating than your average stick. And everyone knows how to play hundreds of games with a humble stick.
Kinect is a glimpse perhaps one or two steps further down the same road; removing the stick entirely and instead making the player the controller, making virtual play feel more natural and tangible, and hopefully dropping further barriers to enjoying video games to yet more people in the same way Nintendo did with Wii.
Whilst the inevitable, eye-rolling Minority Report parallelisms abound, it’s not a stretch to say Kinect won’t provide this high-fidelity interaction. But it does bring a technology that everyone can understand a little bit closer. It’s certainly going to be the talk of E3 at any rate.
18th June 2010 at 9:25 am
Interesting piece, Pete. I don’t often read about console usability so this may be blindingly obvious, but it seems to me that the success of the Wii (and hence the possible future success of Kinect) is not only the simplicity but the fact that the body movement makes the interaction more inclusive to other people in the room, somehow.
When you’re watching someone else play a standard console game, you’re on the outside; when they’re swaying around, waving their arms (and generally looking like a loon…), you’re involved. It’s a more sociable experience. I’d assume that this has something to do with the success of the Wii in a family / non-traditional-gamer environment?
18th June 2010 at 9:32 am
Motion-based controls are simply more natural; it’s possibly the most direct, simplest and immediate way to interact with anything. You don’t need to learn anything new or strange – like three different directional controls and 12 separate buttons! – you can just get straight on with playing and having fun.
The inclusion’s an excellent point though; motion controls force you into the room, to occupy and control the space you and others are in by necessity. It’s something I’d not considered that directly before, yet it’s so obvious.