A week of skepticism

There were three things I saw or heard of this week that on first “glance” I was skeptical of.

The first was Project Natal from Microsoft. Anything Microsoft does these days makes me skeptical. I wrote a blog this week for work on Bing, Microsoft’s new “decision engine” and why we didn’t need it. After a few days of playing with it, my mind hasn’t changed. Bing is like Mahalo on steroids, but at the end of the day, it is still like Mahalo.

The premise of Natal, a new video game controller for the XBOX 360 is essentially that of the Wii’s controller — an interface that lowers the barrier to entry for people who are initimidated holding a joystiq. Now, I am not sure I have ever met the folks who these controllers are designed for, but none the less, Natal basically turns your body into a control mechanism for playing a game. It does it by using some cameras. I was skeptical, but the truth is that Natal is pretty damned cool. Some of the technical demos showing off the way it works will blow you away. I especially like the one with Milo, a computer generated boy who can read your facial expressions and act accordingly.

I’d never wave my arms to “fake fight” with a computer game but, the applications for Natal are pretty much limitless.

Next up was Google Wave. For a long time I’ve been saying Google just needs to focus on search. Then I saw Google Wave and realized that, yes, the folks working for the big G are pretty smart. Wave is basically email “reinvented” for today. It has a lot in common with a Wiki and an Instant Messenger client, while maintaining some of the traditional functions of email. Its really hard to explain, so watch the tech demo of Google Wave to get a much better idea. Really excited about it coming out!

The final bit of erased skepticism came from an agency web site that a coworker of mine posted to our internal work Twitter. This web site is done completely in video, and uses clickable hotspots to navigate. The video I saw was hosted in You Tube, but my guess is that it would work anywhere. One thing I hadn’t considered about this site was just how portable it was. You could basically load it on a Flash drive if you wanted, since it is just a video essentially. The agency in question was Boone Oakley out of North Carolina. Bravo guys!