Lionhead Details Xbox 360's Virtual Child Milo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40E3oq5DGxQ heres the vid

cut to two years later.....


---Peter M. - "while Milo was certainly an exciting project, we understand he didn't live up to our (read: my) lofty goals which was to create a sentient being on a 3rd generation console.. We'll do better next time!"---

*devs wheel peter away in a Hannibal Lecter-style straight-jacket*

None of us know what proportion of the demo was faked. We are all guessing based on some formula combining our mistrust/faith in Molyneux, our hope/cynicism of the new technology. Till we hear what the select audience has to say on thier experience of Milo then we are just going speculate aimlessly how real it is.

Personally its more exciting how the girl interacted with Milo/the software rather than how smart Milo is or not.

On a basic level: Facial recogition, emotion recognition, voice recogition, gesture recognition. The benefits to gaming can possibly be immense.

No matter how real it was. It's definatly a step forward, that alone is always worth a nod of respect from me.

Molyneux is at this point a decidedly hilarious caricature of himself. I like the guy, but if you don't know by now to take anything he says about AI with a freighter-load of salt, then you're just too young to remember his illustrious history of boasts about revolutionary AI breakthroughs that will cause the Earth to stop spinning on its axis.

I can see it right now...somebody playing this game naked.

So within the "few months" that Lionshead has been using this technology they want us to believe that they developed a highly-complex AI that you can interact with via motion controls and perfect voice recognition. yeah freaking right.

This had to be scripted out the butt. I might have been able to appreciate whatever this was if my skeptical neurons weren't firing on all cylinders. Now I'll just have to wait for more honest information on this before I can decide how interested I should be.

This all needs to be taken with a huge grain of salt... I think there is some pretty sweet middle ground where stuff like conversations in Fallout and Mass Effect type games could be taken up a notch.

Instead of your list of entirely canned responses(from you the player) there could be a list of subjects you could ask about on the screen. Using natural language you could ask the about one of the topics. The voice recognition doesn't have to be amazingly accurate because all it needs to recognize or look out for are the keywords from the list, but where you could change things is how you ask: angry, sarcastic, happy tones etc. Again it doesn't have to be the most accurate thing in the world, but it would suck you in that much more without the need for Sci-fi movie quality recognition and still using recorded dialog on the games end. Hopefully there would be some other touches like better eye tracking of your actual head or you can pass them items by moving your hand to the screen.

There are also huge leaps to be made in some annoying stuff like inventory management in RPGs...

Obviously we're not going to be saying "Holy shit this is the Holodeck" sometime next year, but I really do think this thing (voice + controllerless sensing) is going to start baby stepping towards more immersive interactivity, even in games where you are using the 360 controller.

KILL MILO

KILL MILO

KILL MILO

Peter Molyneux and camera-based controls? There's a match made in hell.

A pair of "googles" huh? haha. I assume you meant goggles. :P

Pedophile Trainer '09!

Man, and here I thought that the record for the world's most misleadingly scripted demo was going to be mine forever.

what a joke this was. they tried to make it look like he was some ai character or something. like every single thing he did or said wasnt scripted and pre recorded. how this could ever be a real app any time in the next few decades is a joke. youd quickly see all of the pre programmed crap and be bored of it in no time.
plus it was all simulated anyways. the "kid" was looking to the side at the girl to make the camera vantage point seem like he is looking at the girl. but a character on screen does not look like its looking at you unless its looking STRAIGHT ahead since the tv screen is 2d, not 3d.

this is something truly brilliant (if it works like it should) just think of the possabiltys this could lead too.

hey milo that's no ORANGE!...