Microsoft’s new Project Natal has the retail world buzzing but not only because of its potential gaming sales. Its also potentially game-changing for retail store design.
Project Natal is, in a nutshell, “controller-free gaming”. Its a small black bar with a RGB camera, depth sensor and microphone. What it does is track your full body movement in 3-D whilst responding to commands, directions or even a shift in emotion in your voice. It is not light dependant, recognises you just by looking at your face and doesn’t just react to key words but understands what you’re saying.
So why are some of us all excited? Well think for a second what this technology could do for in-store digital signage & interactive displays. Something which can your customer’s expressions, detect changes in voice tone, work out which way they’re moving and how fast. And more importantly customise messages to them based of any or all of this information. Or they could just measure it – how wonderful would that be for audience measurement of digital signage or for measurement of instore movement, how people view shelves & products.
Other products have tried to master gesture based interaction but the accuracy has never been that great. The demonstrations of Natal well and truely seem to show that barrier has been broken with well over 90% accuracy levels. And even better, as this system has been designed for the consumer market its not likely to be expensive for other applications.
