Why Natal Is a Big Deal 303
Kikizo has an editorial piece evaluating the Xbox 360's upcoming motion-control scheme, Project Natal, and discussing why it's a bigger step forward for interactive gaming than many people think. Quoting: "[Natal] accurately perceives players in 3D space, simultaneously tracking over 48 joints on your body, enabling it to accurately redraw your skeleton in real time as you move about. On a separate 'debug screen' in the closed-doors session, we could witness for ourselves the 'mind's eye' of Natal, visually showing how it completely understands where we are, how we're moving, where we are in 3D space, how far in front of my face my hand is, whatever. It can supposedly even track individual hand and finger movement when it switches into this more finely-tuned mode. ... There is a surprising feeling of tactility and iPhone-like fluidity and precision to the way Natal works." Another interesting bit of news about Natal is that Wii-hacker Johnny Chung Lee is part of the development team. We've discussed some of his creations in the past.
Re:Another Reason It's Important (Score:3, Informative)
I guess Nintendo pioneered what is the next step in video games much like Sony pioneering the transition from directional pad to miniature joystick. My question now is really whether or not the PS3 will follow suit. They have to in order to attract these motion titles, don't they?
Nintendo pioneered the miniature joystick as well. The n64 had analog sticks more than a year before the dual shock debuted. Nintendo always innovates, while everyone else takes.
Re:Movie industry knows better (Score:3, Informative)
>If this 'clever' Microsoft thing is so good, I think the movie industry would have already been using a similar system.
You dont need absurd accuracy for Natal to work. The film industry does. Not to mention people wont wear a suit of ping-pong balls.
The Natal tech is actually very neat. It projects an infrared grid and can measure distance by how the distorted the grid gets. Sorry if it gets in the way of your knee-jerk MS bashing.
Re:The Gamertag Report (Score:3, Informative)
Did anyone else get out of breath just watching the girl play breakout?
Haven't seen the video, but depending on what age she was and how much she was bouncing about, I'm guessing a lot of /.ers got out of breath watching her :P
Anyway, I feel exactly the opposite when it comes to performing motions in computer games. I love that drumming at expert level on Rock Band actually needs real drumming skills. My drumming improved greatly within a couple of months of getting Rock Band (I've never had real lessons, just taught myself) and within maybe 4 months I had completed the whole thing on Expert, was well chuffed with that (Run to the Hills is insanely fast and it took a month or two just to be able to do it even after I had completed everything else).
I was going to say that I'd much prefer being able to fight myself than using a controller, but using full force and speed of technique without actually having a target to hit is pretty bad for your muscles and joints, so you are kind of right that it's better to have a real partner. But I'd love a game that actually took control of a fighting robot or something so that you could spar anytime you wanted instead of having to pay a lot of money each month to a martial arts club (where yes you can do proper sparring depending on what you're learning, but most of the time it will just be practicing individual techniques and grading patterns etc). A robot of that quality would obviously be quite pricey, but so is joining a real sports club. If the robot also doubled up as a sex slave, then it would be a complete bargain!
Sorry to rain on your parade... (Score:3, Informative)
1) It's probably not, that's why it's not due out for at very least a year, probably 18 months minimum.
2, 3, 4) It uses an infrared projector and monochrome camera, so low light isn't actually an issue. I'm not sure which site I read it at, but the reports coming back from E3 said most the demos were actually done in dark rooms. Regarding subtle movements, the racing movements are much more subtle, they have to be as not every race track is a sharp corner. It's also worth pointing out that even existing camera tecnhology such as cheap logitech webcams can handle subtle movement and that's without anything as precise as Natal and is simply image parsing so there's no reason this would be an issue.
5) Supposedly this is one of it's strong points, it can track multiple people round the room. The paint demo kinda showed it and the promotional video shows it, but it'd be nice to see something more solid here for sure.
6) Well, Microsoft stated at E3 they only sent the dev kits out the day they announced it so of course games aren't around yet. No one can make a full blown game in just a couple of days. That said, Microsoft themselves had at least released some demos such as Ricochet and their modified version of Burnout paradise at least so for a technology so early in it's lifecycle it's clearly not totally devoid of application. Ricochet and Burnout were certainly real time environments and certainly were not controlled.
Most of this information has been widely mentioned and shown already in run of the mill E3 coverage. Certainly there are a lot of questions about it, but those you pose in your post have already been pretty much entirely covered and demonstrated already bar perhaps point 5 which could do with more demos for sure. I'd imagine Microsoft will release more over the coming year and now developers have the devkits (apparently they sent 1000 out) we'll probably start seeing demos of actual games using it in a year or so. Perhaps the most obvious point that arises from your questions though is that Natal is clearly nowhere near release - as I stated in another post, I don't even know if we'll see it fully exploited this console generation. I think it'll be at least 2011 before we see it really doing it's stuff in live games as that gives 2 years for the first round of AAA titles to be built for it.
Re:Depth sensing camera (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Infra-red is a color, you nitwit. (Score:3, Informative)
"Infra-red is a color, you nitwit"
Yeah? So what does it look like? Is it like red, but darker? More "infra"? Oh what, you've never seen it, even though your eyes are right now being bombarded by infra-red radiation?
What's the color of X-rays?
Infra-red is a frequency of light just like the visible spectrum is. Maybe that's the nitpick you meant to make but couldn't because they didn't make that mistake, so you had to make one of your own instead.
Gah! Willful, unthinking ignorance like this really yanks my chain. When you get things like this wrong it makes me want to ignore you completely, because you're probably an idiot.
Indeed. "blah blah casual market but what about hard core gamers?" Whatever. There are "hard core" games for the Wii, there may be for Natal but it's less likely in this generation simply because it's an add-on. Either way this is as much about the casual market as it is about realizing that the technology is there to make motion controls work and it has a lot of potential for all gamers.