At first glance, the “demonstrated, ready to ship but really just not yet” Microsoft Project Natal looks fascinating. Finally a push forward on the otherwise tired Xbox 360 platform which, despite being a strong games console, has yet to really integrate into the house.

I know it can do media streaming and all those other goodness things. But in terms of actually delivering notable benefits, this has been a second-class citizen compared to a Media Center computer once you move outside of the games market.

But perhaps this is changing. Certainly, the announcement that Sky will be streaming video to it is interesting, albeit only for those on large bandwidth connections and with the approval of their ISPs.

And the interactive person-to-person demonstration from Peter Molyneux (head of games developer Lionhead Studios) certainly made me gasp. He says that all of this is possible on the new platform. And I believe him more than a jazzed-up video demo from Microsoft.

I think there are two interesting questions from this – firstly, how well will it really work? Is there enough spatial-recognition capability in the Natal sensor box to see small movements, or will it really require lots of arm flailing?

And what is the business perspective here? Clearly I’m not expecting Excel to grow a skateboarder interface – that team has better things to do, like making it do proper mathematics first and not generating bad results.

But there should be a lot here for developers of business software – face recognition, gesture control, watching what the user is actually doing, and so forth. A small amount of this wizardry could make a significant improvement to the business desktop.

As always, the proof will be in the pudding, and you can get too excited about benefits that never really happen. However, I’ll certainly be watching with interest to see if Natal does get a second life well outside its current proposed incarnation.