I went up to the coffee machine and for a quick moment I was expecting dispenser to recognize me and serve me a coffee of my taste, I make daily for myself at my office kitchen. This happened right after I came back after watching Microsoft’s announcement of Natal at E3.

Natal, as you might be aware is a new xbox project announced by Microsoft, which would change the way players interact with their gaming system (xbox console). You dont need any controller to do whatever you have been using it to play on xbox.

This is a dawn of a Natural User Interaction (NUI).

All of this and other observation leads me to this conclusion:

As we become computers, computer becomes us (human).

We first trained ourself to to be able to interact with computer the way it understand, and now we are making computer to understand human. I believe this is a law of human machine interaction. I would call it Garg’s law of human machine interaction.

While Natal is a big step towards the realization of NUI, I believe its just a scratch on the surface of the possibilities.  There are machines/equipments/tools all around us which decides its behaviour (or perform it function) taking external factors into consideration (say thermometer, barometer), but now machines would be capable of considering one more a very important factor i.e. human body.

Be  it getting trained on salsa in front of your TV screen, lessons on table etiquette, or practicing or even conducting interviews via Natal enabled system, possibilities are endless.

Just try to imagine a human in a machine when you go near a machine next time and tell me what you thought it could do.

Till than game On!!

I upgraded my Dell M1330 couple of days back to Windows 7 beta from Vista and I am quite amazed with it.

It just works…

Apart from me liking Internet Games on Windows 7 for obvious reasons, there are tones of great features which makes it hawt!.

If you have not checked it out, download it now and do not forget to checkout games.

Obama, presidential candidate in USA is advertising within XBOX games, taking political campaigning to the next level.

Here is the complete story from GigaOm.

And why not, millions of people are playing games. Even my mother in-law is hooked on to PGR3 since she is here with me in USA.

I happen to check www.bunchball.com today after very very long time (almost 2 years) and wrote about their intentions of Animated web collaboration

What I saw today is a big leap from what they had 2 years back. I just checked Facebook game application which is powered by bunchball’s flash engine.

Game collection is just ok and finding a player online to play with can be tough ( I am sure this will change with its rising popularity) but I liked the idea of karma point and speciality avatars.

See below this is something I just created using 200 KP.

Cute, isn’t?

I am wondering why this is just a plug-in app for facebook and not a full fledged service running independently? Rajat?

Here comes the helmet mounted WII controler. Interesting video

Check it out
Read the rest of this entry »

Finally I got a chance to try my hands on Nitendo Wii yesterday at Sumit’s house.

It was all fun creating Mii, fishing, playing pool, shooting down balloons and more. Vibha won almost all rounds in all of the games but had fun loosing

I must say Nintendo has done great job there with motion sensors and the size of the console. Graphics were not that great but I had very good gaming experience and surely would also be loved by moms as well.

Waiting for Nintendo to launch its console in India OR how about picking one of those on my next trip to US

Some pics from recent IGDA event I attended

Penalists ( Left–> Right)
Vishal Gondal (Indiagames)
Chris Early (Microsoft Casual Games)
Rajesh Rao (Dhruva Interactive)
Amol Gurwara (Electronic Arts)
Deepak Abhot (Zapak)

Event got very well attended by professionals working in gaming domain. Some of the people in the above frame I know are John Prashant, Ankur, Sumit & Yashraj.

One of the reasons, which is keeping me bit busy is this:

Hyderabad IGDA chapter is hosting a Panel discussion on ‘Opportunities in Casual Gaming Industry’ and Microsoft Casual Games India team is sponsoring this event.

If you are interested in attending this event, please send RSVP to purpleblade@gmail.com with your contact number

playtime

This weekend I played marathon rounds (some 5 hours) of TransAmerica an addictive board game with my wife Vibha.

It was fun but sad that I lost most of the rounds to Vibha .