Kinect is Microsoft’s new add-on for the Xbox 360, coming out on November 10th. It is a “controllerless controller” – or a “motion controller”, depending on how you want to look at it. It is in a similar vein to the Nintendo Wii’s controller or the Playstation Move, but with an extra – and awesome – twist; you don’t need to use a controller at all.

To play games with Kinect, all you need to do is place yourself in front of the TV with the Kinect sensor device aimed at you, and you’re good to go. Let the extremely complex hardware and software behind the games take over, and just interact with the games in an entirely intuitive and natural way. I’m going to write more about the technical details behind Kinect in another post, for the Robotics nerds out there!

So below I’ve embedded two videos of Kinect gameplay. The first of these is a look at a bit of in-game footage, some explanation as to how Kinect is to use and play with, and a tiny bit of technical detail (not much I promise). Following up from that is a video of the Windows Phone 7 competition at #ukpdc10, where @Daniel_Parker walked off with a Windows Phone 7 having run 2x100m.

Yesterday Apple went and busted out iOS 4.2 for iPad, coming (discouragingly late in the year) in November. With it they also got some people from Epic Games up on stage to demo one of their creations.

The game “Project Sword” is still in the works, but I can tell you now it looks brilliant. This is because they have released a preview of the Citadel area of the game as a free app for iPhone and iPad. The free app is simply a walkaround where you can just run around the Citadel area (no other people to meet as yet, and you can’t go in many places).

The game uses the Unreal engine ported to iOS, which makes for some absolutely superb and quite frankly mind-blowing realtime 3D rendering.

I included some screenshots of Epic Citadel below for your viewing pleasure.

Last night I was invited along to 1000 Heads in London for a gaming night.

I had already met quite a few of the people there at the recent Geek Quiz, but there was a load of new people to meet as well which was great. Add to that a big stack of free pizza, beer, gaming-themed cupcakes, the world cup on a big screen and just about every game console I could remember, and it was a pretty epic night.

Sadly my Mario Kart skills weren’t quite up to scratch, failing to make the final of the competition, but that was more than made up for by some seriously entertaining gaming, conversation and laughs with everyone there.

Check out the short video I took the opportunity of shooting below – pictures to follow.

A few days ago, I was at a Google-organised event in London talking about open source technologies and how they form the foundation of various projects.

I was first last week to break news of Quake 2 running inside Google Chrome, which was demoed at the event – awesome!