Coming soon: Gesture recognition on your X-Box

BANGALORE, INDIA: Imagine your X-box ‘recognizing’ that you have walked into your room, imagine it greeting you depending on the time of the day, and letting you play your favorite game using your hands, legs and whatever else as your ‘tools’. Imagine also a scenario where you sync up with your X-Box friend, and you ‘respond’ real time to his game plan. Now stop imagining.

All these functionalities are more will be bundled into the new X-Box that would be released this holiday season. The product would be part of Project Natal, Microsoft’s Natural Usage Interface (NUI) based initiatives. Primarily, it works on three important parameters – a 3D Microphone that captures multiple sounds real time, a volumetric camera that senses ‘depth’ of the image, and an I.R camera – all working in conjunction with each other to recreate a ‘real’ bunch of images, leading to an ‘action’.

This stems out from Microsoft’s thrust on Graphical User Interfaces, starting with the Ribbon GUI that was introduced across Office, browsers and other product lines. The Ribbon GUI incidentally is available also to developers to create applications with similar look and feel to Microsoft products.

Microsoft also claims that its graphical interface initiatives will continue to form a phenomenal part of the company’s R&D initiatives, and find its way into other products. Interestingly, Microsoft is also planning to incorporate gesture-based capabilities to enterprise productivity tools, like boardroom applications and intuitive virtual office tools.