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Sliced Gaming Feature: A Talk with Robbie Bach - The Future of Technology and Entertainment

Writer: R J Gaffney
Posted: 18th February 2010, 8:51am Clarke

He spoke about Surface and some guy who had trouble counting fingers and toes took over (it took him a while to figure out that Surface's ability to follow fifty points of contact would mean, with ten fingers each, five people could use both hands at once). He demo's Surface and it seemed terribly complicated under the hood for something very uninteresting (IMHO, but then I'm a Luddite perfectly happy with a keyboard and mouse set-up for most tasks). He put his Lonely Planet card on Surface (which recognised it immediately thanks to the Lonely Planet app that was currently running) and dragged some stuff on to it, went to his desktop, put his card number in the web browser and it had the stuff from surface show up in the web browser. “Everything should do this” he said, and I agree. But you shouldn't need a $20,000 dedicated coffee table computer to do it. 

Later on in the evening during the Q&A, someone queried the durability of a touch-screen coffee table like Surface, so, after some audience enthusiasm, Bach hopped on top of it and stood quite comfortably to much good-hearted cheering.

Bach said the time would soon come when Live will not be a gaming service but an entertainment service, with movie and TV streaming and other functions. In the U.S., Xbox Live now streams Netflix movies over the internet (just like you can do on any PC). In the U.K. at the moment they use Live to stream soccer matches and mates can watch them together while chatting over Xbox Live. He said we will soon be able to sign in to Live from our phones and play a game on their phone before playing it on a web browser on the PC and then logging in to the Xbox at home and finishing the game for real (I imagine a similar deal to what Blizzard is doing with World of Warcraft and the iPhone marketplace app). Then again, MS said this stuff would happen a few years ago with Windows Mobile phones and it still hasn't, not even with Zune (which Bach is also the head of as the President of Entertainment and Devices).

The best way to predict the future is to create it. - Peter Drucker

Bach spoke about the difficulty of using a keyboard and mouse when using a computer and problems with his thumbs when using a controller and how an interface should be more natural. Not that I don't disagree, but I think there is also a disconnect between users who did not grow up with this tech and users who have, and users who have don't have trouble. A video played (which can be viewed here) which is a speculative video from Microsoft of what could be possible in the future.

Bach then mentioned the way Microsoft is moving forward with gesture and voice recognition with Natal. Bach mentioned that he didn't see Natal replacing the controller. He ... (continued next page)