Natal tech will come into the rest of our lives soon
Author: Arthur Ricky // Category: Microsoft
Microsoft is a massive company that ships quite a lot of products each year. And yet, when CEO Steve Ballmer decided to highlight just one as Microsoft’s most exciting product of 2010 in front of a group of executives, he talked about the upcoming Natal. Ballmer was in South America to speak with customers primarily about Microsoft’s line of Online products, such as Exchange Online and Live Meeting, but it was Natal that was bestowed with that honor — though it wasn’t necessarily the videogame functions he seemed excited about. While we’ll primarily see Natal as a method for playing games when it’s released later this year, Ballmer is also excited about the non-gaming applications of Natal.
“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,” he said earlier this week in Bogota, Colombia (via ZDNet). “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.”
“It’s a technology that we call Natal. It’s a little camera and microphone that sits on top of your TV set,” Ballmer explained for the uninitiated. “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.”
He 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.”
Whether or not that’s something that the average consumer is actually interested in remains to be seen. Either way, we’ll be seeing a lot more of Natal at E3 in June, ahead of its release later this year.