Natal Details to Surface at Gamesfest

Develop Magazine has obtained what it considers to be confirmed information that Microsoft will show much more about their Natal platform at their February Gamesfest conference. This comes after a 2009 hiatus for the series of events for the development community held in Seattle, London, and Tokyo.

Via Develop:

The description for the design track reads: "Project Natal not only revolutionizes the way people play games, but also changes the way games are designed and created. The Project Natal Design track will present innovative thinking and ideas to help you take your game from office to living room—creating new ways to work, building showcase experiences, divining user intent, and designing gestures for UI versus game interactions. Discover best practices and what makes the “magic” in a Project Natal game."

Meanwhile the tech track's blurb reads: "Project Natal provides a groundbreaking new way for games to use natural user motion to interact with the Xbox 360. Experience the future now, with this cutting-edge technology! Join us to learn how to develop world-class titles using Project Natal, which provides many exciting new features that can be challenging to programmers. In the Project Natal Technical track, we will walk you through how to overcome these challenges with a combination of classic techniques and new thinking. We will explore the depths of this exciting technology and dive deep into gesture recognition, avatar retargeting, speech recognition, advanced raw stream processing, handling different player environments, and many other topics. No controller required!"

This follows earlier reports this month that Microsoft has secretly been visiting major publishers to sell them on developing for Natal in time for the system's predicted fiscal Q3 launch next year, and their recent postings for development jobs for Natal and their Halo-focused 343 studios. Ubisoft also specified that they'll dedicate significant support to the Natal platform in their earnings call this week, with plans to ship up to 10 titles within 6 months of its launch.

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