Windows 8 NUI Gaming

Will Windows 8 usher in the era of NUI gaming for computers? Windows 7 certainly didn’t manage to do it, but the potential for marrying natural user interfaces with next generation gaming experiences is there, and is bound to become only more comprehensive with Windows vNext.

Over the weekend, I could not help thinking back to the Touch Pack that Microsoft released a few months after Windows 7 RTM. Remember it?

The Touch Pack consisted of six titles, three casual games and just as many applications ported from Microsoft Surface to Windows 7. All of them NUI-enabled.

The Touch Pack revealed what kind of NUI experiences Windows 7 was already capable of supporting. I’ve had the chance to play with the Touch Pack’s NUI apps and games most recently in the fall of 2010, on a next generation monitor.

I was joined by a friend who pointed out a range of caveats, including the performance impairment on what was a high end machine, but also obvious interaction limitations. As much as I felt as a kid in a candy store, he was indeed right; Microsoft still had a lot of work to do before NUI gaming on Windows would become reality.

I do see a possibility that Windows 8 will introduce a new level in terms of NUI capabilities, and I do hope that it will be on part with what the Xbox 360 plus Kinect can already do today.

Having done a bit of digging, I can now say that it’s not as simple as just plugging in a Kinect sensor into a Windows 8 machine, and start using it.

Sure, the software giant is already flirting with the idea, with the Kinect for Windows software development kit that the company announced.

The truth is that the Kinect for Windows SDK is simply not enough. There are NUI scenarios which require the most basic of interaction, such as entertainment experiences, but there are also those which will require extremely complex interaction, such as games.

The current Windows 7 gestures API is quite limited in this regard, with support for a little over a handful of gestures, and limitations on just how many of those gestures the users can perform simultaneously.

Windows 8 needs to change this. But in order for this to happen, the Redmond company must make the next version of Windows as appealing as possible to game developers. So more tools are required, code samples, controls, new Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), Visual Studio vNext enhancements, etc.

Since we’ve already seen Windows 8 enhancements such as facial recognition and human presence detection, I’d dare to say that Microsoft is on the right track to supporting NUI gaming with Windows 8. But this is just speculation on my part, and should be taken as such.