Project Natal - See for yourself
A lot has been written about Microsoft's new motion sensing technology "Project Natal," but it's hard to capture the essence of the product with words.
With that in mind, here's the initial presentation Microsoft showed as it rolled out the product at its press conference earlier this week, showing some of the potential it sees for "Natal".
Chris Morris reports on the business and culture of video games and offers analysis of recent events and industry trends.
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Posted by: bitirim | July 09, 2009 at 04:17 AM
There was definitely some lag during the live presentation of Natal -- and I asked Shane Kim about that when I spoke with him during the show. His explanation, which was plausible, was the intensely bright lights threw the sensor off.
I'm willing to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt on this for now, but definitely agree that if we see that sort of bug when this launches, it will be devastating for Natal.
Posted by: Chris Morris | June 11, 2009 at 09:07 AM
The gap between Microsoft's "Vision statement" for this hardware and the quality of the live demo shown on stage was pretty stark and shouldn't be ignored.
To a trained developer with a keen eye, the live demo showed a lot of lag between the player's movements on the on-screen avatar movements, as well as a high degree of mis-tracking (legs twisting in impossible ways, joints flipping 180-degrees instantaneously).
In controllers, lag is everything (both Natal and OnLive staffers should get this tattooed on their foreheads). Contrast with the Sony live demo which, despite a somewhat absurd-looking controller, exhibited an impressive lack of lag and high accuracy in tracking.
Microsoft seems to be on the track of a good novelty item for the occasional party game, whereas Sony seems to be looking for something that has more game-changing potential (with the emphasis on GAME). If only they could make the physical controller look a tad less absurd...
Both of these technologies are essentially just re-purposed from the Mocap world, and both are going to run into a problem that has bedevilled Mocap for years - how to deal with the problem of obscuring the camera's view with a single point of vision?
How many cameras will I have to setup around my TV set to reach 99%+ accuracy? Anything less is not going to be accepted for anything more than a social party game or novelty. That seems to be what Microsoft is looking to do, to "out casual" Nintendo.
As usual, Microsoft shows up to every hip party about 12 months late.
Posted by: Robert | June 09, 2009 at 09:22 AM