Peter Molyneux's Virtual Boy

I want to say one thing off the bat right here, I don't like the Microsoft Kinect. For gaming, that is. But that doesn't mean it's a bad idea. The Kinect can and is being used for some truly incredible things. Take for example legendary game designer Peter Molyneux's newest project, Milo.

This presentation from a 2010 TED event in Oxford, England shows off just what exactly Milo is, essentially an artificial intelligence. Molyneux's entire idea behind the project was to use the Kinect to make some kind of character that the player could truly interact with. Just from a presentation stand point, Molyneux was right on the ball the whole time. He used stories about how him and his team were using years old software from an abandoned Microsoft project to make Milo to really capture the attention of the audiences. And of course, the actual demonstration of the software behind him helped too.

A little bit about that; when Milo was revealed at E3 a few months prior, people didn't understand what it was. Was it a game? Some kind of software? A tech demo for the then new Kinect? What people needed was a live demonstration. This, at TED, was their demonstration and Molyneux demonstrated it perfectly.

I said earlier that I don't like the Kinect for gaming. But I do think the Kinect is good for something and that's experimenting. And while Milo has still yet to make any sort of appearance on store shelves, he still proves that Kinect can be used for much more then gaming.

If you want to see the full TED talk on this, click this pretty link right here:
http://www.ted.com/talks/peter_molyneux_demos_milo_the_virtual_boy.html