Milo and Natal from E3

If we decided what had won E3 for the most press and buzz, undoubt­edly it is Xbox 360’s Natal (nah-tall). This project is bring­ing the next level of inter­ac­tion and immer­sion in games. The abil­ity for us to move past the Wii’s active level using a con­troller into an active gam­ing expe­ri­ence on our own.

Now the first thing is to share that a bit of this tech­nol­ogy is bought or licensed by Microsoft, it isn’t their own. Johnny Lee, who is best known for the hack he did with the Wii, where he mod­i­fied a pair of glasses to inter­act with the Wii and cre­ate an impres­sive expe­ri­ence where the screen reflected his loca­tion and ori­en­ta­tion, allow­ing him to lit­er­ally look behind objects and such. Also I saw a demo for some of the func­tion where a per­son can con­trol sys­tems with­out any con­troller, such as we saw the flick­ing through movies etc.

Of the demos though, Natal’s Milo is the most amaz­ing, stun­ning and unbe­liev­able. The func­tion­al­ity shown in this demo is so smooth and real­is­tic I find it very hard to believe.

Fur­ther, I real­ized halfway through the video that Milo had not fallen into the Uncanny Val­ley for me. Obvi­ously he’s still clearly ani­mated and not going for the 100% real­is­tic look, instead going with a more artis­tic nearly anime art style while still stay­ing some­what close to realistic.

But con­sid­er­ing even the ani­ma­tion as ho-hum, con­sider the AI we’re shown. The abil­ity for the sys­tem to process nat­ural lan­guage, detect inflec­tions, and the cre­ation of real­is­tic audio. Just wow. This could be truly epic and if the game / sys­tem con­tin­ues to develop in this way, I will def­i­nitely be acquir­ing an Xbox 360 for it.