Milo and Kate by Lionhead Studios

At E3, Microsoft also showed stunning video of the Project Natal game “Milo and Kate” by Peter Molyneux of Lionhead Studios, for the Xbox 360. It was also demoed to some reporters and lucky individuals. The boy is called Milo (or Milly if you choose a girl), and Kate is the name of their pet dog. This video is truly awesome:

It features facial recognition, tone-of-voice recognition, some simple speech recognition, recognition of the colour of your clothes, head-tracked perspective, gesture recognition, augmented reality with your real reflection showing in the rippling lake along with virtual objects, and recognition of when you are holding up a sheet of paper to the camera. While it can see and recognise what’s on the piece of paper, and insert the paper into the virtual world, it has been confirmed that this XBox 360 game never actually does that properly, because they were worried about people drawing rude things.

One thing you might notice in the video… You can’t see Claire’s goggles that she put on, even though you can see her reflection in the water. I think the augmented reality would be better if they added in the goggles, which is perfectly possible to do with Project Natal.

“Milo and Kate” is a real game, with real objectives.

Here is an interview Peter Molyneux gave at E3 after the video was shown:

In other interviews, Peter Molyneux revealed more information. This game will automatically download updated dialogue from the internet: “For example, Milo will download dialogue very regularly behind the scenes which updates his database with current events. So, if Britain’s Got Talent is on, he’ll comment on certain acts, so that makes him feel so relevant and real that you start believing it, even if you’re a sceptic.”

He explained how it creates the illusion you’re talking to Milo: “We’re building up a profile of the emotion in your voice so we know when your voice is strained or excited or calm or passive. That coupled with Milo’s vocabulary of words he understands and what he’s doing on screen creates this illusion…”

“Milo can recognise the emotions on your face and the emotions in your voice. He can recognise certain words you say. You can have conversations with him, you can read stories to him. We’re trying to bring all these things together. Some of them are tricks – I’ll be absolutely honest with you – to make you believe Milo’s real.

He can recognise what you’re wearing. If he notices you’ve got dark bags under your eyes he will say, ‘You look tired today.’”

But there’s a catch: “The interesting thing is you can only talk to him when the Talk icon appears at the bottom of the screen. That’s when he’s listening to you; the rest of the time, he’s not. He’s listening to you because there’s a context in which you can talk to him.”

And he described the gameplay: “You can buy stuff for Milo’s world, like a bicycle or a trampoline. He’ll come back from school one day and say, ‘Oh, Alex’ – Alex is this character at school who always does a bit better than Milo – ‘Alex has got a new bike. When can we get a new bike?’

To get that bike you need to earn money by doing activities. There are three activities you can do, and the amount of time you spend on each activity sculpts your Milo in different ways – so everybody’s Milo will be completely unique to them.

If you do lots of work, your Milo will be very studious. His hair will have a side parting. He’ll be quite worried about his appearance and he won’t like to get dirty. Whereas if you do more of the play stuff with Milo, he’ll be more of a kid who goes out and scratches his knees.

Your character doesn’t have to be a boy, it can be a girl. At the start you can choose whether to be play as Milly or Milo.”

The game is planned to be ready for the release of Project Natal, and at E3 they had already implemented a large percentage of the game content.

Lionsgate Studios is the company that made the game “Black & White” which was practically the only game to support the Essential Reality P5 Virtual Reality Glove.