Project Natal is… Kinect?

Kinect, eh?

E3 is a special time of year for gamers. New games are announced, new technology is revealed, and game developers make complete fools out of themselves on stage. Needless to say, it’s pretty much one of the best weeks in the year. Although E3 starts today, Microsoft wasted no time on trying to win the crowd this year. Yesterday, a separate conference was held in order to show off the highly anticipated “Project Natal” motion camera for the Xbox 360. Today, Microsoft had it’s global Xbox 360 presentation that had a lot of details on “Project Natal”. While this is pretty much Microsoft’s answer to the motion control phenomenon that has swept the gaming industry, Natal didn’t pull any punches in it’s personal conference and the big Microsoft press conference.

According to IGN.com and the Microsoft press conference at E3, the true name for “Project Natal” has been revealed as Kinect. While no one has any real idea what this means, this is what it will be called for it’s release. While many videos were shown at the special showing of Kinect, Microsoft also showed public demos of certain games and interfaces. The Kinect interface on the Xbox 360 is entered by simply waving you hand in front of the screen. This not only makes the motion sensitive menu pop up, but it also scans the player’s face and logs them into their “gamertag” profile. From this menu, games, movies, music and other features can be accessed, such as Facebook, Twitter, Netflix and ESPN. The menu can not only be sorted through by the use of movement, but by voice command as well. According to the stage demo, simply saying the word “Xbox” made the next words that the player says a command. Commands such as “Xbox, play music”, “Xbox, pause movie” and  ”Xbox, root for Ohio State” were shown on stage with little to no glitches or latency.

The first game shown for the newly dubbed Kinect was Kinect Sports is basically Wii Sports, but for Xbox 360. It also shows many more sports than what is available on the Wii, such as soccer, track and field, obstacle courses, and more. Kinect Adventures is a title featuring many mini-games that seem to be more centered around full body movements rather than the simple gestures used in other Kinect titled games. White water rafting and Wipeout-style gameplay are among these featured mini-games.

Harmonix has released info and gameplay footage of a new dancing game called Dance Central, which is only usable with Kinect. Instead of single point tracking or the need of dance pads, Dance Central actively uses the camera of Kinect and is centered around full body, pop culture dancing. This is something that no other peripheral can do today. Artists such as Lady Gaga and Usher will have music in Dance Central.

The new Fitness game for Kinect, called Your Shape, is in development under Ubisoft. While the game and menu is loading up, Kinect scans the player’s entire body, and is able to read off certain information. This includes height, weight, hip size, arm span and and estimated BMI while pin-pointing the player’s muscle groups. Your Shape has features such as yoga, martial art training, flexibility exercises, and Tai Chi sessions.

If last year’s “Milo” AI presentation hooked up with Nintendogs and had a love child *pushing image out of my head*, it would be Kinectimals. Kinectimals is a game all about owning a pet and interacting with it via Kinect’s camera and microphone. Certain activities were demonstrated with Kinectimals‘ AI tiger, such as hide and seek, jump rope, fetch, scrubbing and voice commands such as play dead, roll over and sit. The AI, while childish, was very responsive to the 8 year old girl that lead the demonstration. Talk about user friendly.

All the games listed above are going to be available when Kinect launches on November 4th, but there is one more game that is in development right now for 2011. LucasArts is creating a Kinect Star Wars game, where the player can actively use a lightsaber and the Force with their respective body movements. Although the video was rather short for this perticular game, it showed a player doing all sorts of cool Star Wars manuevers, including deflecting laser blasts with a lightsaber and Force Pushing stormtroopers out of the way.

With Kinect only a few months away, Microsoft certainly didn’t hold back on it’s presentation. E3 2010 is one day old, and Kinect is already the talk of the crowd. Needless to say, it’s going to take a lot from Sony and/or Nintendo to top this news, let alone motion control technology.