When The Game Gets Tough, The Tough Get Rid Of The Controller

Microsoft Xbox Natal Project: Innovating the 10-feet Experience Beyond Gaming
 
This year's E3 convention revived the gaming world with many exciting news, after some months of stagnation. Beyond the usual (and excellent) games parade, the biggest bangs came from the innovation race of the controllers and of the user experience.
 
Undeniably Microsoft's Natal demo was a great surprise: it was stunning and left the audience with their mouth opened. At a first sight it's clearly aiming at casual gamers and party games market, now main hunting ground for the Nintendo's Wii. But there could be much more. The new controller-less hand free gestural interaction system seems looking far beyond gaming experience. Together with the other Xbox news (Facebook and Twitter integration, full HD video experience, and so on) it can really change the living room 10-feet experience, enabling a rich eco-system made up of multiple convergent experiences: entertainment, casual gaming, social networking, HD television and multimedia content enjoyment and so on.
 
Microsoft's strategy is getting clear: they want to move over the Nintendo Wii, merging gaming and media center experience. Compared to the competitors' solutions, the leap ahead of the new Xbox Natal is really tangible and promising.
 
Anyway, no matter how well the feature-tracking capabilities of Microsoft's Natal product perform, there is a valid question about how gestural controller-less input could really completely replace the tactile nature of interacting with a physical controller. Wouldn't it be much more compelling to combine Natal's voice and gestural input with the tactile input and feedback of a physical controller?
 
To be really natural and intuitive, interaction requires a device to hold with hands with buttons and triggers to press. The Xbox Natal demo itself gives a good evidence in this direction: why do we have to drive a racing car without handling a steering wheel? Or why do we have to play a shooting game without a gun and a trigger? A compelling experience is given also by the physical contact with a device that provides the proper affordances to our actions and makes the interaction richer and deeper, and even more realistic. Albeit still relatively limited in its current implementation, also hectic or force feedback add an interesting dimension to the gaming experience.
 
The key question however is whether Xbox users would want to control their full Xbox experience with physical gestures. Consider the type of activities that take place in the TV domain and the different user behaviours that come with it. Watching movies, listening to music or browsing through a collection of holiday pictures may require a less-intense type of interaction that allows the user to sit back and relax. Natal's speech-recognition engine will partly fulfill this need (if it is a 100% reliable), but it is questionable whether this will completely replace the physical controller that provides the user with a sense of control and responsiveness. There are plenty of opportunities to improve the controller as it exists today and even if Nintendo appears to be on the right path, it may be premature to declare it dead with the announcement of Xbox Natal.
 
Probably it's too early to pass any judgment on this great initiative by Microsoft and in the end the consumer will benefit from the giant leap forward in gaming technology, if only because it will be an incentive for Nintendo and Sony to start doing night shifts in their innovation labs.
 
Surprisingly, Nintendo remained a bit in the background at this E3.  But, at the end, they don't need to improve too much yet: they are the solid leader of the market. Probably they can rest on their laurels. For a while.

By Associate Creative Directors Gianluca Brugnoli & Robert Kortenoeven