The annual industry show-and-tell starts out at the LA Convention Centre today, but Microsoft’s pre-E3 event last night has already shoved the Peripheral Formerly Known as Project Natal into the neon spotlights. It probably helps when you’ve got a life-size elephant puppet and Cirque du Soleil’s certifiable brand of outrageously kitsch extravagance backing you up.
Recently renamed Kinect, the motion controller looks more or less exactly the same as pictures all over the internet have had it for months already, but now a little blacker and shinier and somewhat more strangely sinister.
Performers in leotards and animal make-up, presumably representing the average Xbox 360 owner, put the peripheral through its paces, including Avatar racing title Joyride, something called Kinectimals that looks like Nintendogs, the inevitable sports and fitness stuff, MTV’s Dance Central, and a collection of Wii-type wave-your-arms-around mini-games dubbed Kinect Adventures.
“For lots of people, that controller is a barrier,” said creative director Kudo Tsunoda. “We set out to make a new control paradigm where anybody can get in and play, without having to read the instructions or learn a complicated set of controls.”
Moving into potentially more interesting areas, however, was an unnamed Star Wars game from LucasArts that had the player brandishing an invisible lightsaber in front of the camera. Although, I can’t quite work out why this is better than a proper lightsaber peripheral. Because a proper lightsaber peripheral would be totally awesome.
At least they’ve kinda got that Minority Report-style menu navigation going on, but conspicuously absent from the demonstration was the object scanning and voice recognition functionality suggested at last year’s big reveal. Of course, that Star Trek holodeck object scanning always looked extremely unlikely or at least 10 years too soon, but voice recognition not so much. Perhaps something will turn up at Microsoft’s E3 conference later today, when the company is also expect to yank the covers from its hotly rumoured “slim” console redesign.
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