With Microsoft's new Kinect camera, new kinds of interactivity will be coming to living rooms. Marc Whitten, the General Manager of Xbox Live, tells about speech recognition, about natural control, and how Kinect will change the living room.

At a press event today, Microsoft unveiled a slimmer, cheaper Xbox 360 that will be released later this week for $299. Besides a sleeker design, the new console will include built-in WiFi-- the current box requires a peripheral WiFi antenna-- and 250GB harddrive. Microsoft also surprised the audience with the announcement they'd be sending everyone in attendance-- some 1,000 members of the media--  a new 360.

Everyone is busy talking about Microsoft Kinect (the project formerly known as Natal), but to me, some much bigger news just dropped at E3 from Microsoft: ESPN live sports access. Simply put: this was the only thing holding me back from completely canceling my cable subscription. As soon as this goes live, I’m done with cable forever.