Every year, video game technology increasingly resembles the fanciful ideas found in a Star Trek episode. In 2006, Nintendo released the Wii, which was the first home video game console based around motion sensitive controls and featured games that one could directly interact with using physical movements, as opposed to strictly pressing buttons. The Wii proved wildly popular, outselling its competitors, the PS3 and Xbox 360, and in December 2009, broke the record for best-selling console in a single month in the United States. It was so successful in fact, that the PS3 almost immediately tried to implement some degree of motion sensitive control in its system, introducing the Six-axis controller. The Wii made video games a more physical activity than they had ever been perceived as and appealed to a wide demographic including people who were specifically non-gamers. It's simple, fun interactivity made it appealing to all types, not just hardcore gamers.

On November 4th, 2010, however, Microsoft intends to up the ante in a big way by releasing the Microsoft Kinect. The Xbox 360 Kinect is webcam style peripheral that detects motion, gestures, facial expressions, and voice commands, using this as the medium through which players interact with games. Whereas the Wii still used a controller whose presence and physical orientation were detected by the system, the Xbox Kinect requires no controller whatsoever. The gamer's physical self is detected using an RGB camera and depth sensor capable of three dimensional motion capture, so that no controller is required to interact with the system. One's physical movements are read and interpreted directly by the game.

The Kinect is capable of simultaneously tracking up to six separate people, with a feature extraction of 20 joints or 48 skeletal points per player, and depending on their distance from the sensor bar, is able to interpret the movements of individual fingers. The sensor bar itself is seated atop a motorized pivot that can tilt 27 degrees up or down, and has an angular field of view of 57 degrees. Between the motion capture capabilities and the sensor bar's ability to physically orient itself, the system is even able to track and follow a moving person during applications such as video chat via Xbox Live or Windows Live Messenger.

Where the Wii was merely a glimpse into what home consoles were truly capable of, the Kinect firmly commits itself to that path and aims to revolutionize not only the way games are played, but what truly defines a game. So innovative is the technology in fact, that Microsoft intends for this to function almost as the release of an entirely new console, which doesn't seem unfair given that the Kinect will most certainly make the Xbox 360 function as new. Thus far, 16 launch titles have been announced, with a myriad more no doubt on the way.

Between the Kinect, and similarly exciting systems in development for the Playstation 3 - in addition to whatever innovations 3rd party software developers are able to wring out of the technology - the future of gaming promises to be something truly out of science fiction.