This could even be a great way to navigate through menus on certain games (whether the game needs a controller or not). The demo video displayed a woman flipping through the Xbox Live menus to browse and play a movie.
Just these features alone have a lot of possibilities for new and core gamers. Fighting simulators can now be a full bodied experience for training or practice or maybe even teaching. Imagine taking that a step further and actually being able to have a Guitar Hero game where you actually use a real guitar to play! In fact, why limit it to that? It would seem that you could scan most instruments in and use them I would think. I'm not quite sure of the limits of this scanning technology but it seems as if this idea can't be too far away given what was shown at the E3 demo.
The 3-D scanner technology did show a kid scanning in his skateboard to use in a Tony Hawk-like game, so doing so for the new popular music games doesn’t seem like much of a stretch now. I’m pretty certain that the VR goggle experience is probably on the horizon as well. Next thing you know the old Nintendo Glove will make a return to the gaming scene!
Think of how this technology could simplify the controls for strategy or RTS games. It would definitely revive and expand the popularity of these games beyond PC gaming to be fun on consoles finally. That is, of course, if developers spend the time using and developing the interface for their games.
Lastly, the presentation showed a revolutionary A.I. interaction module developed by developers Lionhead. They named the project Milo and showed a video that had a person have a full blown artificial intelligence conversation with a boy named Milo. The person asked Milo questions and the virtual boy answered the questions and made quirky little observations about the person based on facial expressions and vocal tones. Since A.I. is pretty heavy on the computation it will be interesting to see how this technology would be used in a game.
Article comments
1 - Charlie
The teaching aspects are limitless. TV has cartoon characters that help children learn a new language, but imagine how much more effective this would be if the character could recognize correct pronunciation. It doesn't stop there. Flash cards where the child can shout out the answer and the character can say correct or incorrect for math, science, language, etc. Intuitive karate classes in your own home where the instructor can stop and correct form. I am excited to see all the possibilities