Xbox controller-less motion control is officially announced at E3 2010. It used to be called Project Natal when it was unveiled last year at E3 2009. It is now called Kinect. It has a rotatable camera to detect your movements and a microphone for voice controls.
With Kinect, you can control the menus by simply raising your hands or by speaking. Some examples of voice controls, to pause a video playing, say "Xbox, pause", to resume, say "Xbox, play", to stop the video, say "Xbox, stop. Sounds futuristic? But it works, as shown in the E3 2010 demo. You can also do video chatting and the camera will track your body so that if you move out of the frame, the camera will pan along to keep you in the frame.
Kinect comes with a few games, such as Kinect Sports, Kinect Joyride, Kinect Adventure and etc. Looking at the demos, I would say that Kinect is quite responsive and can register movements very well. Playing Kinect games would require the gamer to move the whole body, this will encourage players to be more active when playing games. And in my opinion, these kind of motion control games are more suited to family titles and fun-filled games. Most of the games unveiled for Kinect are mostly fitness-related and family fun games, which Nintendo Wii has already done, except that its in high definition now. I wonder how hardcore games like first person shooters and realtime strategy games would work with Kinect but we shall keep an eye for such demos. So far, Kinect has been demo-ed for driving, running, yoga, hip hop dancing, light saber swinging, etc.
**Edit** Forza (racing game) was quickly demo-ed to show how Kinect is used to add interactivity into the game. For eg, you can "walk" around a virtual car, like at a car show room, by leaning left and right.
Controller-less motion control is a first in the world and we hope that Microsoft will do a good job. The games, however, may not be so original since we have seen many similar games on the Nintendo Wii. The only selling point for these games is that they are in high definition. Kinect will officially go on sale in Nov 2010.
