Some of the features offered by Microsoft's Project Natal, which caused such a raucous at E3 2009, are already in the PlayStation Eye - a statement dropped by Sony at this years Develop Conference.

According to Sony, their R&D department has already developed facial recognition software for the PlayStation Eye, which can see the position and direction of a player's head and can work out the gender and age of the face, and detects different parts of the face including nose, mouth, eyes, eyebrows, shape of the mouth - and even glasses.

While Sony may not have realised the sort of public interest such software can cause until after E3 2009, they're keen to show that they're not out of the running just yet.

However, Microsoft is hard at work developing Natal's software, and admits that Natal may be used in offices on PC's in the future, and that it certainly isn't the only new hardware in the 360's future.

“We effectively reinvented the Xbox once already when we rewrote the dashboard,” Spencer says, “It’s not about trying to sell consumers a new piece of hardware at the wrong time, it’s about evolving the platform continuously. And we are going to find things, like Natal, that are hardware related to also do that," says Phil Spencer of Microsoft Game Studios in an interview with industry analytics MCV.

We instead want consumers and developers to know that we are all going to make a huge return on that original investment in the hardware… In the current climate that’s something people are going to appreciate much more.”

Whether or not Sony's advancements on the PlayStation Eye are enough to steer potential Natal users away from the Microsoft service is yet to see, but don't expect either of the technologies to be on the market until at least late 2010.

Linford

Labels: 360, Linford Butler, Microsoft, Natal, PlayStation Eye, PS3

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