E3 kicks off today and for those of you who don't know what that is, its the biggest video game conference of the year. E3 stands for the Electronic Entertainment Expo and the biggest video game news of the year is announced here. And after watching Microsoft's press conference, I can say the future is here and its frightening.
Microsoft, after announcing a number of triple-A video games coming to the 360, completely floored me with their announcement of motion-sensing technology. I know what you're thinking, "I liked it better when it was called the Wii" which was exactly what I thought at first. Microsoft's motion-sensing technology differs from the Wii in that you don't even use a controller, and the camera (which you would set on top of your TV) is capable of capturing your full body movements. They showed a demo of a girl frantically trying to kick balls that were flying at her onscreen avatar and it appeared that the camera captured every single movement even down to her little flinches.
The demo continued with the announcement that not only does this technology have motion-sensing, but voice recognition as well. Then ensued a guy who was painting an onscreen canvas with his avatar and simply by speaking which colors he wanted to use, the game recognized it and would change as he painted a picture of a palm tree on a beach.
Then the next part got really creepy. They showed this technology going even further to science fiction level escapades as they introduced a character called Milo. Milo is an actual video game character that a real person can interact with. Using the voice recognition technology, a real person talked to Milo and asked how he was doing and he would even ask questions back. The real person went and played with Milo and fished with him and drew pictures and there was point where the real person drew a picture on a piece of paper and held it up to the camera and immediately Milo had a white piece of paper in his hand as if she had just handed it to him in real life. He looked at the drawing and actually commented on it. I don't know how I felt about this. It was strange and kind of frightening to see a real person interact with a video game character in this way but at the same time, it was fascinating that things like this were possible. Microsoft made no announcements about the price of this technology at this time but I don't see it being very cheap.
It was a hell of a way to kick off E3 and I'm interested to see what the next three days of the conference holds.
1 comment:
That does sound really cool, what's frightening to me is that if they have that for video games what kind of technology does the government have that we don't know about! Still it's really cool! You should go to one of those conferences sometime.
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