In June 2009, Microsoft premiered a terrific hype trailer - "product vision," they called it - for the device that would become this season's Xbox 360 Kinect sensor. Vision trailers tend not to match reality. How close did Microsoft get?
Here is that Kinect trailer, shown at E3 2009, back when the Kinect was still code-named Project Natal. Gamers and gaming journalists had seen little of this kind of no-controller controller before. Some of what was promised seemed hard to believe.
Kotaku has annotated the trailer to see how the hype squares with what Microsoft delivered when Kinect was launched in early November 2010.
Did Microsoft get close enough?
They did get close, though some of the wilder ideas have not become reality, as you can see.
For comparison, a couple of years ago, a former colleague of mine pored over Nintendo's 2005 Wii hype trailer. That article had given Nintendo three years to do deliver what they hyped. We'll have to check back in on Kinect in 2013.