Hands on: Microsoft Project Natal review

When Microsoft unveiled Project Natal, its non-physical game controller, at E3, it certainly caused astonishment, but there was an undercurrent of scepticism – after all, the smoke and mirrors of press conferences can gloss over most quirks and imperfections, and Natal seemed so outlandish that one had to question whether it would work in the typical, chaotic living room in which one's Xbox 360 generally resides.

But at the GamesCom show in Cologne, I managed to use the system, and all those doubts evaporated.

Project Natal is a game-changer, quite literally – one of those items of technology which has one racking one's brains to imagine the different ways in which it will transform its sphere (in this case, of course, videogames).

The easiest way to describe it is as effectively having a motion-capture studio in one's home. It can lock onto human bodies and track their movements in such minute detail, and with such responsiveness, that developers can use it to let players control their games with the tiniest of gestures.

Microsoft demonstrated two Project Natal apps at GamesCom, both stunning when you got to jump in and try them out. The first is a sort of Breakout, in which you look down a virtual room, at the end of which are blocks.

The system scans you, and puts a ghost outline of your body on the screen; balls bounce towards them, and you must send them back to break the blocks, using whatever part of your body is appropriate. By moving around in front of the system, you can head, kick or chest balls, bat them back with your arms and so on.

NATAL: Look, I'm playing 'soccerball'!

The second demo was simply a tweaked version of Burnout Paradise, in which you stood up (or you can sit down), put your arms out in front of you as if gripping an imaginary steering wheel and move your hands as you would if gripping a real steering wheel in order to steer your virtual car.

Step forward with your right foot to accelerate, and back to brake. This felt a bit odd at first, but only for a few seconds: the sheer responsiveness meant that you soon trusted the system.

Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Project Natal is that, unlike even the Wii's control system, it requires no calibration, and a glimpse at the end of the demo at a developer's kit screen which showed the data processes let us instantly understand why that should be and, indeed, how the system works. It sucks in a lot of data, with infra-red sensors, a video-camera and a high-end directional microphone, but its real genius lies in how it processes that data (it has its own microprocessor which, one suspects, is a custom job).

NATAL: And this is what it looks like