Microsoft unveil Project Natal

I just finished reading the live blog on Kotaku and watching the delayed video stream on xbox.com of the Microsoft press conference at E3. It was so much better than last year’s, one of the best I’ve seen — I think it will be hard for Sony and Nintendo to better it and they keep giving me reasons not to buy a PS3. While the first hour was just about new games, many of which I’d seen before, the later half was full of amazing announcements. It’s well worth reading through the summaries (CO-OP should be up soon) — since I’m most interested in the interaction and service Xbox Live provides rather than just the games I want to give my feedback on the related announcements. Not that it doesn’t look like there aren’t some great games on the way.

Firstly, wow — artificial intelligence comes to a console. A character that recognises, converses and interacts with you. Not much more was really said just yet and the demo will be only shown to a select audience behind closed doors but definitely worth looking out for, my guess is the Internet will be full of related information shortly.

Impressive — the new control method — sans any controller, looks amazing. I was expecting some sort of new motion controller but never thought they’d actually get rid of the controller hardware and adopt motion capture and face recognition technology. I’m afraid it probably won’t work as well as it does in the video and may be more of a gimmick, but still can’t wait to try it out! A whole host of new opportunities and games are available using this technology.

Social networking in the living room. I think bringing facebook and twitter to Xbox Live is one of the best decisions they could have made — along with Last.fm and Zune 1080p video content. Social networking has been increasingly popular on the PC, then the phone, the living room was really the next touch point and I’ve been preaching this for a while now. Sony have been trying to leverage Home as a new social network around the PSN. While it’s got a nice 3D interface and some great social tools, having multiple separate social networks kinda defeats the purpose of a social network — so leveraging and integrating with an existing one is really the only way forward. There’s also the ability to share and watch video and game content with other Xbox owners around the world.