E3: A Revealing Look at Xbox 360’s Natal

Since I’m stuck offline at work all day during the show I was sure to fill up my laptop this morning with all the E3 PR assets I could download to pour over with my undivided lunch break time. I came across this image which is much much larger and shows the girl (Gabrielle? Can’t remember her name) showing off the Ricochet demo.

What I didn’t notice in the tiny live stream I was watching yesterday was just how massive the Natal display was. This thing looks like a home theatre setup from 1991 but it seems, upon closer scrutiny, that it’s all Natal. Most obvious at top left is a camera/sensor rig that looks like Johnny 5’s head from Short Circuit, not the sleek black bar we’ve seen in the promo videos thus far. To the right is a much harder to see jumble of cables and possibly more sensor hardware, and then there’s the massive bar below the TV. I couldn’t pull out any detail (because look how great I did with the righthand enhancement) but I can only assume it’s more hardware required to make Natal work.

But we all know it’s legit because the thing was right there, working almost flawlessly in front of thousands. This photo just goes to show there’s a long, long road to a retail release for Microsoft. A year? A year and a half? When they said it’d be compatible with all future consoles do you think they were implying that Natal may not happen ’til the next generation? However long it takes I can’t wait to see what happens next!