Project Natal E3 Update
June 4, 2009
Phil Spencer, head of Microsoft Games Studios has been put under the spotlight with regards to the new phenomenon Project Natal which is all the rage at the E3 conference this week.
When asked how long Microsoft have been working on Project Natal Phil replied:
“Project Natal is the combination of a lot of software work that’s been going on within the company for quite a while. If you think about the different technologies at play–you have facial recognition, voice recognition, skeletal tracking–you have things that Microsoft research has been working on for years.
Some of this stuff, like voice recognition, you’ve seen in the past and it’s a continuation of that work. It’s based on strengths we have. We’re a software company that’s focused on research and development. As content creators at Microsoft worldwide studios, we’ve been thinking about the barriers to people playing games for a while. We’ve thought about controller-less gaming and how we’d interact–Dimitri was something we incubated at Lionhead many years ago and what you see in Milo today is sort of the culmination of platform innovation working in sync with a lot of our content creators and content leaders.”
And when asked about a price of launch date Phil said:
“We’re using this E3 to show the progress we’ve made. We have a firm belief that we have the technology and creations that will define the market when they come out for this space. As first-party, we’ve always been about tentpole games, call them showcases or hero experiences, either for Live or for the 360, or for the original Xbox when it came out.
The work had come along and we felt that we had a solid plan with a solid launch portfolio and a portfolio for the next few years, so we thought we should start talking about this publicly. We’re shipping dev kits out, which clearly when you start shipping dev kits out, the chances of leaks and everything go up. But frankly, I thought we were ready to stand on stage and show of our work, and I thought it held up pretty well.”
So its been an interesting week so far with more and more information being leaked every day. To read the full conversation follow here.
