.:Out-of-the-box:.

Term Project Natal should be recognized by many of you. Many more were totally astonished by this announcement coming from Microsoft at last E3 conference. Since that moment, not only gamers and game developers have started thinking on new challenges and opportunities, but also regular, little geeky gadget boys and girls sometimes outside gaming community. I’ve seen also many innovators in different areas of technology who started asking questions. If you anyhow missed the announcement, below clip should explain the technology itself:

If you’re interested in Project Natal and you’re a developer, you cannot miss next Microsoft Gamefestconference. In February, 2010 in Seattle’s edition, I spotted two very interesting session tracks covering Natal from design and technological perspective. I think this is first time, when technical details of Natal will be presented to broader audience. As far as I know, up to the moment only internal Microsoft teams and studios have access to this information. Some chosen 3rd party developers with interesting project opportunities probably were also invited for testing.

Broad communication means that Project Natal is closer and closer to gamers. I hope that post Gamefest 2010 era will also show some critical improvements in Xna to allow community developer check it out too. Track details are below (taken from the conference pages):

“Project Natal” – Design

“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.

“Project Natal” – Technology

“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!

Will "Reverse" achieve as spectacular success in America as it has recently done Poland?

Older I am, more confused I am with my approach to movies. I remember when I was first time in America couple of years ago and had very interesting conversation about movies with some local guys. I was asked a simple question: what kind of movies do I like.
At that time, for me, movies in theaters were just a cheap and easy alternative for live spectacles, for which I could not (yes, my fault) find time to organize myself and go. So I was choosing usually more ambitious movie projects with more flexible schedule at big cinematic complexes and I was watching them quite often. I looked for some artistic taste in each and every movie I had watched. Coming back to the question,  I answered, “I like ambitious movies and prefer directors with crazy ideas”, like Lars von Trier, Coens brothers, David Lynch to give some examples. In response I heard: “that’s funny, I go watching movies to relax and stop thinking for a moment, not to torment myself with hard to understand content”. And I had understood that approach too. I appreciated simple action and brainless comedies too, but not as a majority of my choices.

There are different tastes and I believe many people can say totally different story, if somebody asked them the same simple question. I think that many more go and watch movies just to experience some primal sense fun with easy story and great special effects. That’s where the power of Hollywood have established itself for a while. For me balance is important. I’m happy to perceive that a good mixture of fun, f/x pimping up the atmosphere and rich, surprising story seems to be more common in recent movies. It just makes it harder to judge simply, which movies are 100% good and which are 100% crappy with no single line of defense. Fair enough.

I’m giving this long introduction to my yesterday’s activity, which was a trip to local cinema and watching new Polish movie entitled “Reverse”. I’m talking about it because this movie is our, Polish, candidate for American Academy’s Awards, best known as Oscars. Having all above indicators in mind, I’m wondering if that movie will be anyhow noticed by American critics. I think “Reverse”, although it’s not easy movie to understand for a foreigner, has all these elements I have already mentioned. It has good balance of general fun. It has great story established in a period about which we (at least young) Poles would like to forget and go on. It has also some very interesting techniques used in the movie. Movie is prefabricated to look like old black&white production from the past. It has some shifts between past and presents. The only weakest point is camera. I see so many talented Polish guys behind the camera in American blockbusters. Seems so sad that those, who still make movies in Poland are “old school” so badly. Still a great movie, see below musical theme with well known trumpet player, Gary Guthman performing for it:

Movie’s theme is set in Poland, in middle 50′ties of the past century. A few years after a War War II, in still demolished Warsaw, a post war Polish society and community is rebuilding itself. Poland is influenced badly by early (and hardest) stage of communism with Stalin being still alive. In these “interesting” times we see a simple family of three women: grandmother, mother and adult daughter, struggling in very new for them, hostile world of distrust, invigilation and law made for officials, not for the people. These women have their daily problems bound to the times they lived in. I don’t want to spoil the story, so I’ll add that all these struggles are told in a mix of Woody’s Allen and Coens brothers style. Black humour, parallel personal stories and dramas being correlated in strange way. Movie simple binds you to your seat until it ends. Gay ends, because at the end, it even pays the attention to the modern definition of diversity.

Film has become very popular in Poland, but still I wonder, how will it be perceived in far Los Angeles. We have a history of Oscars given to dear Polish fellows for artistic, niche productions, like Wajda’s movies. Competition doesn’t look as a short list, though. Will see, I wish them good luck. Impressive movie.

Jacek Murawski, General Manager Microsoft Poland

I’m a blogger for a while, millions of people can say the same. It’s good to see that not so well known Internet contributors try to find their space in the Web. It’s even better to see that people who shape various disciplines of our life joined the team.

In Poland we have about 16 milion out of 38 milion people with stable internet connection. From this number, many of course do blog also. We have success stories of people who actually started living out of online journalism. On that wave, many Polish politicians joined blogosphere too several years ago. Lech Wałesa, one of most famous Polish citizens in the World is among them. You can also reach him over local Instant Messenger called Gadu-Gadu (GG#1980).

That’s a proof that we as a nation are growing fast in maturity of Web 2.0 adoption. I haven’t seen though many businessmen contributing to Web 2.0 ideas this way.

I’m proud to tell you that Jacek Murawski, General Manager at Microsoft Poland is presumably first senior corporate executive at subsidiary level, in Poland, who started blogging a month ago. His posts mainly touch Microsoft’s daily business. Jacek is also big enthusiast and curious observer of macro economic changes we experience all the time. That’s second topic of his choice as I observe. He also writes about some trivial aspects of being global citizen (like European Union integration). He writes in Polish language, so without good translator or Polish language proficience you might not understand much. Still – Jacek is the first senior corporate blogger in Poland and I wish him all best to find his own space in this very brutal world of flame wars, devoted commentators and competition tracking your every move.

courtesy of David Longo. Click the image to see more of his amazing works.

I read an interesting article about future platforms in gaming. Square-Enix Executive Yoichi Wada says nothing new, but reminds that “Cloud Computing” will impact heavily also Game Industry.

Social and browser based games will grow dramatically Mr Wada says and Polish Gaming Magazine “Polygamia” fears that if it becomes true, real hardcore gamer related genres will unfortunately die unpopular to all these 10-minutes long game-play browser,facebook, mobile alike alternatives.

I fear not such a thing. Today proves that RIA (Both in Microsoft’s Silverlight and Adobe’s Flash applications) can handle sophisticated 3D engines. What they mostly lack is hardware acceleration and good tool-set back-end for game industry. But still I can play Quake in a browser. Browser, mobile and other you’d think small games grow in size and maturity. I can’t imagine how far it can go in the future but for sure I’m not expecting another Mafia or Farmville clones from Facebook as dominant examples in Cloud Gaming AD 2020.
What I expect is usage of local hardware (GPU, CPU) in some Internet aware device where 100% of the content will be streamlined from the Web. Natural, further evolution of what we have now, don’t you agree? I’m expecting that not hardware capacities but social networking power can be major trigger for new customer acquisition and that’s what have already started, big time!

Today’s hardware and technologies allow us to make it all what Square-Enix’s executive says even now. RIA games grow in size and maturity in amazing speed. Blocker is market readiness to accept dramatical shift in mindset (own versus use) so fast. Industry leaders need to evangelize consumers on that and in fact that are Mr. Wada’s motives in my opinion.

I’m personally not that afraid of shift itself. I’m afraid of equal offer available globally. I do not live in US and I perceive that many services are US and at general a particular country centric. Well educated consumer in Web 2.0 era thinks globally and gets benefits from that.
If a local store cannot offer good price and Dollar is cheap, I make a decision to import something even from Australia. It sounds absurd to my parents but to friends in my age that’s natural decision making.

If service is not available and it is definitely attractive people start cheating. That’s the case of Xbox Live in Poland. That’s the business of all commercial VPNs who allow people to freely utilize treasures of Netflix and have Sky TV over Internet.
As a vendor you can’t possibly block motivated user from evaluating you. They’ll bitch at you (as Polish Xbox users do every time they have good ground to speak), but still they will use it. In Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing era there is no such thing like “not available to you” for whatever reason.

Yeah,

Another “Hello world” in the blogosphere. I feel like I had already done that before. I’ve been blogging since 2004 or 2005 if I remember correctly. Many initiatives with different scope and content maturity. Once in Polish (my native), once testing international reader. Language proficiency in this history has taken also a very crucial part.

I remember very well that first post on MSDN Blogs in English. I tried to make my first professional blog on that platform, sharing my thoughts on Microsoft technologies with local and international readers.

For the moment, idea was not bad, but I quickly realized that with every post written, I’d been more and more interested in local only reader. Reasons were many. In Poland, I was presenting at conferences, trainings and other events for local developers. Language itself was not the problem, but if two Poles do talk, why use English in the background when I referred to something online.

So my English Posts category is long dead there. Quite recently I stopped marking Polish posts with [PL] prefix in the title. I realized that I’m not going to post any more English posts on that site. Not since that blog is cross posted on http://www.msdn.pl pages. [PL] prefix was nice, because I noticed that many other Polish bloggers used that prefix style to highlight their rare English postings (with [EN] for a change). Really interesting observation in social context and unspoken netiquette growth.

With growing popularity of that blog (as for my own acceptable scale), I realized that those pages are more official, regardless of my own statement.

Redesigning my private pages is the reaction. More and more I needed something rather private, something not so strongly branded with “MS only” label. Some place where I could start discussing and examining different topics. Some place where I could tell my international friends and colleagues that this is the place where they can follow my progress.

So I started with this entry. There will be more soon, that’s the blogging idea, right?

To give you short introduction what you can find here in the future, I’m going to explain basic content categories:

• Home – this page obviously gets everything
• Game Industry- My thoughts in this area from tools to design, from trends in business models to simple demands on the market. Definitely an industry worth watching.
• Labs – I’m a creative soul. So I want to share with you some news with my current developments and investigations.
• Microsoft – I work there, so I presume I’ll sneak in some MS-related information too.
• Polish Software Industry – I’m paid to know well what’s going on in my local software market. I’m proud Polish by the way, so why not to promote my country and software from it? Regardless if MS or not, Polish brilliant minds are worth international awareness.  
• Programming – Yeah I know.. I’m addicted. From time to time I presume I’ll paste here some source code too.
• Various Rants – Isn’t it what are you reading just right now?

Cheers,
Daniel Biesiada

PS. As it’s fresh, greetings to all of you guys, whom I met in Los Angeles, CA at PDC 09 this month. It was great time, and Carl Franklin was my best surprise.