One of Microsoft’s latest projects, code-named Project Natal, has left the video-gaming and tech-savvy world buzzing all over the Internet.

Project Natal is a controller-free, motion-sensing game, created for the Xbox 360. They haven’t set a release date, but it is rumored to be out sometime by the end of 2010.

Without a controller, users are able to control the screen and the game through body movements, voice commands and even by using other objects or images they have around them. The game recognizes the player, can differentiate between people and objects in the room and even between different players. The technology of this new interface even includes facial recognition for player sign-ins.

I saw a few demo videos on YouTube, and I’ll admit, it looks pretty cool. I suggest everyone to check those out to be able to fully grasp what Project Natal is. Words don’t really do it justice. Following in the footsteps of Nintendo’s Wii, it seems this new form of interactivity with video games is the way of the future.

However, the same week I first saw the demos for this new Project Natal, I also saw the trailer for a movie coming out in September. “Gamer,” a film that previews describe as a science-fiction action thriller set in the not-too-distant future, is basically a story of the future of video gaming.

In this fictional future, mind control technology mixed with advanced video gaming allows players to control actual human beings, prisoners, in a game called “Slayer,” which seems eerily similar to popular games today such as “Call of Duty” and “Halo,” sans the actual human beings getting killed, of course.

But even so, I’ve watched the video gaming revolution evolve from my early days of playing Sonic the Hedgehog on Sega Genesis, to interactive games, like Xbox Live war games that are so realistic looking, and I’m assuming from their success, addicting. It’s hard for me to find a guy I know at school that doesn’t play a game like that — headphones and microphones plugged in — to make the game more interactive by talking with (or more like yelling at) other players. It almost seems like they really are in the midst of a battle, not just playing a game on a screen.

So you can imagine the chills I got when I saw the trailers for this film around the same time I saw demos for Project Natal. I’m not saying that the premise of the “Gamer” film is going to be the new video gaming set up in five years, but the increased video technology mixed with each new generation’s obsession with these video games, each one more realistic and violent than the last, makes my stomach turn a little.

Reach Shanen at shanen.lloyd@asu.edu