This year’s E3 was all about motion control, and Microsoft kicked off this year’s announcements at their press event early Monday. Out on the show floor the company was showing off several of the 15 launch titles that will accompany Kinect when it comes to retail in North America November 4, and we take a look at them in the video below.

Kinect Adventures, Kinect Joy Ride, Kinectimals and Kinect Sports showcase the concept behind the Kinect system for the Xbox 360 console, which does away with the controller altogether and uses your body to interact with the games. In the four titles shown below, one or more players wave, jump, “drive,” bowl and more using only body motions. It’s similar to what Nintendo did with the Wii console, but obviates the need to hold anything in either hand.

Check out the Kinect video demos below and let us know what you think: is motion gaming a good new age for gaming? Or are you staunchly committed to your controller?

Even as the Kinect-exclusive Dance Central got certain Engadget editors into the groove, it didn’t resonate with all of us, so we headed downstairs for a peek at Your Shape, to get in touch with our inner Zen — and beat things up, of course. We had a blast punching blocks, though the system only recognized strikes that crossed our own body, and some editors were tripped up by the mirrored virtual doubles the game generates.

Actual yoga poses were far better done, with Kinect accurately tracking our moves with little perceptible delay. Unlike in Wii Fit, which merely measures center of balance, a joint gauge of sorts (you can see the angle of your bones) let us readily tell when we were slouching or off-kilter, and adjust our posture respectively. We broke a sweat, looked like doofuses and had fun doing it — what more could you want?

Although the Electronic Entertainment Expo doesn’t officially begin until tomorrow, Microsoft kicked things off early with a pre-show event at Los Angeles’s Wiltern Theater. Some of the details on the hotly-anticipated, motion-controlling Kinect were leaked early, but this morning’s media briefing provided more details as well as a slew of news on upcoming titles for the Xbox 360 platform.

Microsoft unveiled details, trailers and gameplay footage from upcoming sequels for popular franchises like Call of Duty and Fable, as well as a number of new game and partnerships. Read on for our highlights from the media briefing below.

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Blockbuster Xbox 360 Titles

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First we heard updates and saw trailers and gameplay footage from some of the popular blockbuster franchise titles in the Xbox 360 camp. Treyarch studio head Mark Lamia showed footage from Call of Duty: Black Ops, and Head of Microsoft Interactive Entertainment Don Matrick announced a multi-year partnership between Xbox and Activision to launch all COD map packs and add-ons for the game first on the Xbox platform. That agreement will be in place from 2010 to 2012.

Next Hideo Kojima and Shigenobu Matsuyama showed off Metal Gear Solid: Rising. Kojima is executive producing the title after years of PlayStation exclusivity for the franchise. Epic Games’s Cliff Bleszinksi took the stage next with three pals to show off four-player story co-op and mutating enemies in Gears of War 3.

Rounding out the blockbuster reveals were Peter Molyneux with Fable 3 footage and Bungie Creative Director Marcus Lehto with Halo Reach. The sequel to Molyneux’s emotion-laden franchise also got a release date: October 26. We saw the world premier or the Halo Reach campaign which takes a leap into space, and found out that the game will ship this September.

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Kinect and Video Kinect

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Next up we dug into Kinect, one of whose goals is to help Xbox Live’s 25 million members come together more easily. The concept is “making it simple to find the friends and entertainment you care about,” according to Corporate VP of Microsoft Game Center Phil Specter. The idea is to make your living room smarter and more social.

Kinect’s various sensors detect movement and sound, recognize you, respond to your gestures, listen to your voice, and obviate the need to use a remote control for even more things, like controlling your media. Kinect engineer Ron Forbes demonstrated the system to control the Dashboard using hand gestures and voice control. There will also be Zune integration with Kinect, allowing you to use voice commands like “Xbox: pause” and “Xbox: play” to control media playback.

The next demo was Video Kinect, which is essentially a live video chat platform that works seamlessly between you and your Xbox Live friends, as well as anyone on the Windows Live Messenger network. They demoed movie trailers co-watching with a chat partner — a great example of the kinds of social TV experiences we should expect to see more of in our living rooms in the future. As with all of the Kinect features, Video Kinect is completely controller-free; the “technology is invisible.”

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Partnership with ESPN

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A new deal with ESPN will bring over 3,500 live sporting events to Xbox Live in year one. College football, basketball and soccer, plus major league baseball, NBA basketball and more will be streamed over XBLA with most broadcasts being delivered in high definition.

You’ll be able to drill down into scores and stats for players and other interactive elements all while watching the games. You can also make use of Kinect to control playback and media transport options via gestures or voice command, with no controller needed. All of this will be available at no additional cost to Xbox Live Gold members.

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Six Kinect Launch Titles

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Next up we saw six of the 15 Kinect launch titles demoed. In Kinectimals, you interact with wildlife using the Kinect system — think of it as Microsoft’s answer to Nintendogs. It was cute overdose up on stage as a young girl used her hands to pet a baby tiger cub who responded to her hand movements on screen. Various other mini-games are employed in the title, like jump rope.

Next up, Kinect Sports took a big swing at Wii Sports with full-body track racing and more. Kinect Joy Ride is essentially Mario Kart-style go-cart racing using Kinect, and Kinect Adventures is a casual group adventure title featuring mini-games and adventures like rail racing, whitewater rafting and more. You’ll also be able to take in-game “Polaroids” of you and your friends’ adventures and upload them directly to Facebook.

Ubisoft showed off the world premier of Your Shape: Fitness Evolve which is Microsoft’s answer to Wii Fit. The company illustrated the levels of precision made possible by the Kinect system, even down to recognizing the demo woman’s sweater as she took it off. From cardio coach to various gym activities, Ubisoft worked with renowned trainers to design a fitness-oriented game exclusively for the Xbox 360.

MTV Games and Harmonix next unveiled Dance Central; think DanceDance Revolution on steroids. It’s a full-body dance game experience where you follow the precise movements of an avatar on the screen. The developers worked with world-class choreographers to compile over 600 movies and 90 routines, including original routines from some famous music videos. Lady Gaga, No Doubt and the Beastie Boys are featured in the launch lineup of pop, hip-hop, and R&B tracks; more songs will become available for download over time.

Kinect itself also got a launch date: November 4 in North America with 15 launch titles. The only thing missing still at this point is a price.

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New Xbox 360

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After a couple more goodies — including a trailer for a new, controller-less Star Wars title from LucasArts coming in 2011 and footage from a new Forza Motorsport title using Kinect — Microsoft dropped a very big “one more thing”: a new Xbox 360 console. Featuring a 256 GB hard drive, built-in Wi-Fi and a quieter fan, the new device is already available at retail today at the same pricepoint as the current console lineup: $299. Rumors had the new device’s title as “Xbox 360 Slim” but Microsoft is simply dubbing the new console also “Xbox 360.”

So, there may never be a Windows 7 Phone tablet, but that device above looks pretty darn close to what one may have looked like. In actuality that’s just the tablet that Microsoft has been using at Computex to demo its new Windows Embedded Compact 7 supporting Silverlight for Windows Embedded, Flash 10.1, and multitouch within the browser. We caught a few minutes with the NVIDIA Tegra 2-powered, 8.9-inch slate and found ourselves drooling over the Zune / Windows Phone 7-like interface that had been built by Microsoft. But before we tell you to jump past the break to check out the short demo, we want to break the news to you that this UI was created just to show off the capabilities of the new CE platform — there’s no plan to bring it to market as is on Microsoft’s end at the moment.

Instead manufacturers, like ASUS and others, have to do their own engineering with the preview release and then the RTM build that will come later this year. But we certainly wouldn’t object to one of those companies creating something similar to what you are about to witness video below.

photo credit: jeremyfoo

After a lengthy phase of beta testing, Microsoft finally unleashed its long-awaited update to the Office 2007 desktop productivity suite.

Office 2010 includes a number of new features, among them a redesigned menu system, improved inline multimedia editing, real-time collaboration, improved security settings and — perhaps the biggest of them all — a cloud-based web apps component that aims to compete with Google Docs.

The online component of Office 2010 includes web-based versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel and OneNote. They’re largely positioned as companion apps to their full desktop counterparts, making them arguably less powerful as standalone services than existing cloud champions Google Docs or Zoho.

Never one to sit idly by, Google has already launched the first volley in the coming Office Wars by suggesting Office 2007 users would be better served by “upgrading” to Google Docs instead. Still, with an enormous existing base of business Office users, Microsoft will undoubtedly benefit from its incumbent position in the marketplace. Nor have things been totally rosy for Google Docs uptake lately, with Yale University and UC Davis recently dumping the search giant’s cloud services over privacy and security concerns.

Nevertheless, a number of schools are embracing Google services in order to reap all the advantages that come with productivity in the cloud. Will the online component of Microsoft Office 2010 be enough to stave off the competition from Google, Zoho and others? It remains to be seen, but it’s certainly a sign of the times that the once staunchly desktop-chained Office suite has put its head firmly into the cloud.