Holy Holodeck: it's Project Natal!

I'm a very casual gamer who loves horror/ fantasy type FPS (first person shooters), but can't play very long before vertigo sets in, especially when using traditional controllers with which I've never been dextrous (picture a lot of spinning around and looking giddily up & down as I try to get the camera movement down while walking - or worse, shooting... you should've seen the first time I tried to play Halo - ugh). Besides the great appeal of making music either alone or with friends, the instrument-style controllers used for Guitar Hero & Rock Band are most likely what make me primarily a rhythm gamer.

The Wii is fantastic for remedying this issue with their well-documented revolutionary Wiimote & balance board controllers; I actually managed to get through the entirety of Resident Evil 4 successfully without too many dizzy spells. However, the graphics on the Wii are noticeably sub-par*, and many games (such as BioShock, which is one of the primary reasons I bought an XBOX360, and Resident Evil 5) are simply not available for that console, which has a fairly limited processor & memory for a next-gen console.

Enter Microsoft's futuristic new interface, unveiled at E3 today with the assistance of Steven Spielberg: Project Natal. Project Natal leaps far beyond the innovations of the Wiimote and requires NO CONTROLLER WHATSOEVER to interact with games. For reals. The system uses a special camera/ microphone receiver to detect the room in 3D and recognize motion, as well as particular voices and faces to allow you to login to your account or interact with characters, and apparently can even "scan" real-life objects to insert into gameplay (the example I've seen described involves a skateboard).

Woah.

This sounds to me like we're quickly approaching holodeck technology as seen in "Star Trek: The Next Generation", or "Roger Rabbit" interaction between the real & imaginary - a true virtual reality-style interface.


So, the burning unanswered questions right now are:

• when will this be available to the public to use? The technology was just announced & released to developers today, so perhaps not too soon, but not light years away, either.


• It's been said that this technology will work with all XBOX consoles, but it's unclear whether it will make any sense for any of the existing games themselves to be re-coded to work with Project Natal, which would allow those of us wishing for at least a Wiimote type of interface some hope of being able to get through RE5.

I'm just very excited to see this sort of innovation coming so quickly. Now where the heck's that jetpack I was promised?!

*for those who doubt that the processor in the Wii is inferior to the XBOX360, simply take a look at Guitar Hero 3 which has relatively low-load graphics requirements, on both platforms - there is absolutely no comparison in the graphics quality & animation, as well as subtleties in the gameplay & audio.