Project Natal Shown At AllThingsD Show

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The D8 AllThingsD conference was already pretty epic, with Steve Jobs joking about the lost iPhone saga, the Flash controversy and everything else. Today, Microsoft stopped by the stage to demo the human interface to the crowd on hand at the conference.

Molly O’Donell from Microsoft was on hand to demonstrate the device, and she said that while there have been a ton of Xboxes sold and 23 million users on Xbox Live, but they’re always attempting to bring in more and new users. O’Donell didn’t say this, but it’s pretty obvious that Microsoft and Sony were caught with their pants down with the Nintendo Wii, so they’re attempting to emulate that success with the PlayStation Move and Project Natal.

The “natural user interface” that Natal uses is admittedly a cool concept and probably is the way of the future (remember the film Minority Report?). According to O’Donell at the show, Natal uses “skeletal tracking” to track the joints in your limbs to calculate your movements. Pretty cool.

Any new news from the Natal demo? No, other than that O’Donell said that launch games for Natal will be announced soon. When Sony demoed PlayStation Move, they had a full list of games that would be supported by the motion-controller, so Microsoft is sort of behind the ball on not having their own suite of games to announce.

Expect the “real name” of Project Natal to be announced at Microsoft’s E3 press conference on June 14th. (Remember that Natal is named after a town in Brazil, where the project manager hails from). Microsoft also channeled Google a bit by promising a Natal for free to everybody at the D8 conference once they come out.