Introductiuon

So what exactly is Neon?

Neon is a piece of software built into every XBOX 360 made. It's available for you to launch whenever you use your XBOX 360 to play music, just start a track playing and press the Y button to make the Neon go full screen.

At the most basic level, and that which you see when you play audio on the Xbox360, Neon is a music visualiser. As the music plays Neon presents a series of different effects that react to the audio input. I am sure you've seen the same kind of thing in Winamp or iTunes or Windows Media Player, but I hope you will agree that Neon is a bit prettier.

However Neon is much more than just a music visualiser. It belongs to a category of software which I call "light synthesisers". What distinguishes a lightsynth from a visualiser is interactivity. Although Neon can function as a very competent visualiser, that's just what it does when it's not being used, just like the attract mode of a game. Neon is there to be *used*, so next time you're playing some music, put the visualiser full-screen, pick up the controller and prepare to explore.

If you're interested you can learn some more about Neon's rich heritage on our Neon pages

There's an amazing amount of depth to Neon and if you take a bit of time to work through this guide and you'll soon be able to:

• Take full control of the visualisation
• Get accesss to a wide range of effects
• Collaborate with up to 3 friends to put on your own light show

But let's start with something easy:

Controller 1: Camera and Scene Selection