He clarified why he’s talking videogames to big corporate executives, and that’s because of Natal’s ”very general purpose” going forward.
Microsoft are already planning a massive E3 showing this year for Natal, likely to be way bigger than it’s unveiling in 2009. Ballmer gave a speech about his excitement for Natal during his South America tour of all things corporate.
”Perhaps for me the most exciting product we’ll bring to market this year, and it really fits in this context, actually comes out of our videogaming group. You might say, why would I talk to a group of CEOs about videogames? Because the technology actually is very general purpose, and we’ll see come into the rest of our lives pretty soon,” said the boss.
”It’s a technology that we call Natal. It’s a little camera and microphone that sits on top of your TV set. And if you want to control the TV, you don’t go get some remote control or big fat gaming thing. If you want to look through TV channels, you just gesture, and the computer recognizes your voice, it recognizes your gestures.”
”You want to see the next sports program, you go like this, it will cycle you through. You want to play a game and you need to jump, you jump. I’m not going to jump too hard; a little bit too high altitude here in Bogota for that, at least for me. But it recognizes you, it knows your voice, who you are, your gestures, what you’re doing,” Ballmer continued.
“And if you think about that in a lot of settings, why am I carrying this thing? I’ve already forgotten three times where I set it down. I should just be able to go like this, and the camera should recognize that gesture and control the slides for me, and let these kinds of things freely happen.”
Does the ‘general purpose’ of Natal excite you with possibilities, videogamer? It launches this holiday season with rumoured redesigned SKUs for Xbox 360, where apparently black is the new way to go because of our glossy black HD TVs.
Source: VG247
