Project Natal – Not Just for Video Games

You really don’t hear a lot from Bill Gates himself, but when you do it’s big news. Gates has high hopes for Project Natal, and not just for video games but for PC usage as well.

We’ve all seen movies where a character uses a holographic keyboard or manipulates something on a screen with their fingers. It’s always seemed like a technology that wouldn’t make it to us within our time. But the Natal might make that sort of physical computer manupulation possible.

Bill Gates spoke with CNET about the possibilities of the depth-sensing camera technology that the Natal will be utilizing, as well as how the technology is not exclusively for games but also “for media consumption as a whole, and even if they connect it up to Windows PCs for interacting in terms of meetings, and collaboration, and communication.”

He makes the possibilities seem endless, and it seems like both the Xbox teams and the Windows teams are hard at work making the Natal a plausible reality for both platforms.

He continues in responding to a comment on the technology used by the Wii versus that of the Natal, which he dismisses as something entirely different.

“That’s a 3D positional device. This is video recognition. This is a camera seeing what’s going on.”

The previews for the Natal haven’t been breath-taking, but if there is a company that can pull it off right, it is Microsoft. With the project’s high hopes, the Natal is sure to shake things up a lot more than people — gamers and otherwise — are expecting.

Related posts:

1. Microsoft’s Explanation Video on How Project Natal Works
2. Project Natal: More Than Just an Addon?
3. Rare is Searching for More Specialist for Project Natal Project
4. Project Natal Looks Cool, But How Does It Play?
5. Music for Project Natal