At this year’s E3 Microsoft announced Natal (check out the link but prepare for bad acting). Natal offers a new controller-less gaming interface – presumably an attempt to 1-up the wii, and take over your living room. The technology appears to be a depth sensing camera, something which my colleague Derek wrote about in “You may never need a controller again“. It’s a move that suggests that Microsoft got a pretty good deal when it ended up purchasing 3DV systems (a maker of depth sensing cameras) for an alleged $35 million. Here’s their video from E3:

Other aspects of Natal include identity recognition, interaction with virtual characters, and some nice augmented reality tricks like fishing (reminiscent of Reactrix or GestureTek’s virtual fishponds) and being able to pass a piece of paper into a virtual world (see what appears to be a carefully scripted video below):

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