Live Demos of Project Natal – Take that Sony!

If you followed the E3 conference, you must have noticed how Sony and PS 3 fanboys were claiming that Microsoft only showed scripted/acted demos and not live one for Project Natal  ( they acted as the Paint Party and Ricochet demos weren’t live ). Microsoft had promised demos behind closed doors, for people attending the conference and they did stick to their promise. A lot of celebrities, amongst other people, got a taste of Project Natal at E3, and the reaction has been amazing. Felicia Day, Brittany Snow, Aisha Tyler and many others got live demos of Project Natal and the videos are up at the Project Natal Youtube Channel. I’ve embedded Felicia’s hands on video of Project Natal below, others can be seen at the Youtube Channel.

If this isn’t enough for people to believe that Project Natal is real and works as shown, than the lucky guys at Gizmodo also got a hands on and wrote about it in great detail. Here are a few snippets from their hands on experience :

Project Natal is the vision of gaming that’s danced through people’s heads for decades—gaming without the abstraction of controllers, using your body and natural movements—which came more sharply into focus when Nintendo announced the Wii a few years ago. I haven’t been quite this blown away by a tech demo in a long time. It looked neat onstage at Microsoft’s keynote. Seeing it, feeling it in person, makes me want to believe that this what the future of gaming looks like—no buttons, no joysticks, no wands. The only thing left to get rid of is the screen, and even that’ll happen soon enough.

They were given a demo of Burnout as well unlike the others. Here’s what they had to say about it:

But Natal can’t work this well. It just CAN’T. I need to break it, teach this Microsoft prototype a little humility. What if I stand on my tip toes and steer eight feet in the air?

The car handles fine.

What if I kneel on the ground and steer?

Yup, it still works, save for a moment when my knee shifted and I tricked the machine—a fair mistake, even by my highly ridiculous dork standards.

Sadly, they weren’t allowed to take pictures of the game and equipment. But the article is worth a read to understand the experience that Natal provides. To sum it up, all those in denial of the fact that Project Natal is real, in the hands of developers and will be in our homes in a year or two ( depending on software support ), they should take a look at these videos. Microsoft has redefined the future before and they are doing it once again – even without an ‘extremely powerful’ Cell processor.