If you’ve been following my blog, you’ll know that I just joined Microsoft as a Technical Evangelist for the East Coast (US).
While I’m still getting settled in, I hit the ground running by meeting up with fellow Evangelists in other locations.
Starting this week (March 17, 2014 onwards), I will be working at Microsoft as a Technical Evangelist on the East Coast. My focus will be on both cloud services and game development. As I get settled into my new role, expect to see more information about my future appearances and presentations.
If you’ve been following me on Twitter via @shahedC or @OnekSoftGames, you already know that I have already been informally working with developers across the US and the World! 🙂
Ever since The Minority Report was released in 2002, gesture-based computer control has been compared to the NUI features shown in the movie. Sure, the Nintendo Wii came out in 2006 with built-in motion control, but it still required the user to hold a controller in their hand.
Minority Report, from Dreamworks Pictures
Fast-forward to 2010, the original Kinect was introduced as an Xbox 360 accessory. This brought gestures and voice control to a home console like never before. In 2012, Microsoft released Kinect for Windows, which allowed any hobbyist developer to build an app or game for Windows using a slightly-modified version of the Kinect.
Feedback from ID@Xbox:
Chris Charla, Microsoft’s Director of ID@Xbox has this to say about my blog post: “That’s pretty good! Did you mention the free dev kits and the retail -> dev kit transition?”. In response to his feedback, I’ve updated the content, using quotes from Xbox News and Xbox Corporate VP Mark Whitten.
Updated Post:
Some of you may know that I am heading to Microsoft HQ in Redmond to attend the upcoming Xbox One Developer Summit, aka ID@Seattle. This is the first dev summit to welcome the new crop of developers who have signed up for ID@Xbox, the Xbox One’s Indie Developer Program.
I’ve signed an NDA for this event, and will not be revealing any confidential information during/after the event. So, I’ve put together the information below from everything that has already been announced in public.
When Microsoft first showed off Windows 8 and its development stack, their diagram answered some lingering questions and posed a few new ones.
In the world of Indie Game Development, we had many questions. Can we make any game for Windows8 and release it in the Windows Store? Will we be tied down to C++ and DirectX? Wait a minute, where is XNA?
