I was talking with someone on the ‘phone today and we were discussing how AT8 works and what are the dynamics of the company. The title of the blog goes some way to describe the three members of our organisation, but modesty forbids me to put names against the descriptions – those who know us better will have no problem, I suspect.

To help you with your labelling, it’s my turn to blog this week, so I’m going to rave about a new piece of Microsoft technology called ‘Project Natal’ – it’s was launched officially at the E3 show last Monday and is scheduled for release in 2010 and at the moment destined for their XBOX 360 console platform.

Now, I know you might think that I just like new, shiny gadgets (true, I admit), but what has captured my imagination is the level of interaction that this type of technology affords. In previous, more erstwhile blogs, I have spoken about striving for a more natural level of man/machine interaction because of the barriers raised by the use of keyboard, mouse and screen.

The 3½ minute video clip below demonstrates the level of interaction between the program and the user and it’s all happening in real time. Ok, it’s a promotional piece and full of engineered hype, but on the face of it I find it captivating.

Now imagine that type of interactivity in not just a leisure context and we are really starting to ‘cook with gas’ – Some might say it’s some way off and could be argued a little fanciful, but I’d love to try and see if techniques like these can be used to automate a number of potentially dreary data collection and presentation tasks.

Who knows – Milo growing up to be a financial planner?