Gates: Natal "a little over a year away"

Bill Gates has revealed that Natal technology will be usable on PC and is "a little over a year" away.

"I'd say a cool example of that, that you'll see... In a little over a year, is this (depth) camera thing, but for media consumption as a whole, and even if they connect it up to Windows PCs for interacting in terms of meetings, and collaboration, and communication," Gates told CNET.

"Both the Xbox guys and the Windows guys latched onto that and now, even since they latched onto it, the idea of how it can be used in the office is getting much more concrete and is pretty exciting,"

"And I think there's incredible value as we use that in the office connected to a Windows PC," he added.

Gates explained there will be cost reduction over the years, which should make people say, "Why shouldn’t that be in most office environments?"

But, mister Gates, isn’t this technology already available on Wii?

"No, that's not it," he answered. "You can't pick up your tennis racket. You can't sit there with your friends and do those natural things.

"That's a 3D positional device. This is video recognition. This is a camera seeing what's going on."

Project Natal has no release date, but we have plenty of impressions of the technology on our gamepage.