Olive Juice

Actually, the other way around (but that title in reverse didn’t have quite the same ring to it).

Microsoft is launching its Project Natal in October, an immersive controller-free gaming system. By kicking, twisting, shaking, jumping, voice commands, and hand gestures, you are the controller.

A few years back I developed a Pong-game using Processing, which tracked arm movements to control 2 paddles. And if you’ve ever worked with gesture recognition, facial recognition or voice recognition you’ll realize what they’re doing with Project Natal is no small feat. “The skeletal mapping technology shown at E3 2009 was capable of simultaneously tracking up to four users for motion analysis [nice!], with a feature extraction of 48 skeletal points on a human body [no-sah!?!] at a frame rate of 30 hertz [...sold!]. Depending on the person’s distance from the sensor, Project Natal is capable of tracking models that can identify individual fingers. [Finally computer vision that knows when you're flipping it off] ” (wikipedia).

If this launches with a Limbo game, I’m so in.

Although FOWA has hardly come to an end (double-days of Nikki Beach parties beginning tonight!), and tomorrow I’ll be winning the MacBook Air… however, some notes on todays happenings.

Kathy Sierra opened with a keynote “Creating Passionate Users” and cognitive seduction, stating the seemingly obvious but so often overlooked methods for relating to people and engaging users in exceptional experiences. Kathy spoke of our duty towards humanizing technology, getting people to meet – offline, while making more usable/human software. Develop easy-to-master-FAST apps, leaping to the “passion threshold”, where users are able to be great at what they *do* with the tool. It’s not about the tool. It’s about what the tool allows them to do. Get through to feelings and legacy brain. And place a “WTF” button nearby for your site’s users.

Blaine Cook, Twitter Engineer, held together his whimsical panel throughout audience notifications that Twitter was, no surprise, down. Cook warned of feature creep and the importance of adding what users *strongly* request, keep it clean, open APIs, and “use and love” the app you are creating. If you don’t love the service, others won’t either.Leah Culver, Pownce, followed, also pressing “opening code” as a top priority for any web service. 

Microsoft showcased the ever-awesome Photosynth, and a rad 3D maps application, which I didn’t catch the link to.

A panel pointing “what makes the next great startup”: Brilliance, team, confidence/ambition, depth of knowledge/research/ capital structure/right vw/legal issues, open!, distribution, extremism, and of course serendipity.

Remember the Milk’s Emily Boyd presented a quite enjoyable panel on FTM’s birth and lifespan, $0.19 budget, and various interface options (including the iPhone, yet available to the Aussies) (and a hacked GMAIL! love it). 

Off to the party, hosted by Scrapblog!