Posts Tagged ‘CES’

Project Natal Innovation Journey Parody

If you watched the video “Innovation Journey” from CES 2010 that I posted a while ago, then you might enjoy this parody of it: “Transformation Journey into Sameness” by ScrewAttack. If you haven’t watched the original CES video, then view Project Natal at CES 2010 first.

I think Project Natal will be great, so don’t be offended or think I am criticising Natal by posting these parodies.

For more spoof videos about Project Natal, just click on the “parody” tag below.

Project Natal Release Date

At CES 2010, Microsoft officially announced the release date for Project Natal. And the release “date” is:

HOLIDAYS 2010

You can see the announcement at the end of the last video I posted.

Of course they didn’t say which “holidays 2010″ it was. But I’m hoping for Valentine’s Day. So if you see Project Natal in shops next week, remember you heard it here first!

Of course, if they can’t quite make the Valentine’s day holiday release date, I will just have to settle for an Easter holidays release. The fact that they said “holidays“, plural, lends support to my Easter theory, since Easter lasts for several days.

But I may be being overly optimistic here. It would be wiser to assume the latest possible holiday in 2010, which would be Christmas, exactly one week before the end of the year. Or worst case scenario, it will be released to celebrate New Years Eve.

In all seriousness though, since Microsoft, unlike most of the world, are from the United States of America, it’s likely they were referring to a purely American holiday that nobody in the rest of the world knows anything about and wouldn’t know the date of if their life depended on it. Fortunately, we have Wikipedia, which says that the United States celebrates “Thanksgiving” on the last Thursday in November, which for 2010 means the 25th of November, one month before Christmas.

So it’s most likely Project Natal will be released in November, and the “holidays” are likely to be Thanksgiving and Christmas (and New Years Eve).

In related news, the PlayStation 3’s new motion controller, which doesn’t have a name yet, has been delayed to “Fall 2010″. Since they said “Fall” rather than “Autumn”, that’s a pretty good hint that they mean the northern hemisphere and what I, here in the Southern Hemisphere, would actually call “Spring”. And since they only say “Fall” in the United States, and the United States measures seasons starting from the equinox rather than the start of the month like we do here, that actually means somewhere between the 23rd of September and the 23rd of December (What I would call Spring and Summer).

So I think both the Playstation 3’s new motion controller and Project Natal will be released at roughly the same time, in November or October.

But which holiday are you hoping for?

And let’s hope companies eventually learn to give less ambiguous dates that the whole world can understand.

Project Natal at CES 2010

Project Natal’s most recent appearance was at CES 2010 earlier this month.

At CES, Microsoft gave a really boring introduction, then showed a new video called “Innovation Journey”.

This is my favourite video, since it actually explains how Project Natal works, shows what Project Natal’s depth sensor is actually seeing, and talks a bit to some of the people behind it. And of course it tells us the release date!

Note in particular the scenes where it shows on the screen a 3D view of what the depth sensor is seeing, with the different object types colour-coded. Notice how there is a black hole in the background where the camera can’t see what’s there because it’s blocked by you standing in front of it. But aside from that, it has a very good 3D model of the scene. You can see how easy it would be to recognise different kinds of objects from this sort of information, even without the colour data that you also get. Much more powerful than just a camera like eye-toy.

We also get to see a (blurry) close-up of the back of the project natal hardware.

At CES 2010, Microsoft also talked about Xbox Live, and their own version of Nintendo’s Virtual Console. The Xbox is getting a virtual arcade called Games Room, where your avatar can walk into a 3D arcade and see and hear all their purchased arcade games in their 3D cabinets in attract mode before you play them. You can also invite friends and play against them online. They have 30 different arcade games that you can buy.

And they talked about how people will be able to rent and watch videos online quickly, using Xbox Live.