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Microsoft Working On Motion-Sensing Camera For the Xbox 360
The Wall Street Journal reports on the motion-capture technology Microsoft is rumored to be working on for the Xbox 360. "Unlike the Wii, the Microsoft camera won't require users to hold any hardware to control on-screen action, the people familiar with the matter said. The camera would sit near the television and capture when players move their hands, legs or head." The Guardian Games Blog points out that we've gotten a look at this technology before, from a company called 3DV, which was reported to be talking with Microsoft earlier this year. Many expect the specifics of this technology to be revealed at E3 early next month.
This sounds familiar.
[FUCK BETA]
They're going to have to wear a black leotard with whit ping pong balls on it as they jump around....
and in many cases, people don't want to see that.
Dual Opteron < $600
Will the camera also record so people can post videos of themselves failing around online?
The musings of just another geek and his junk.
One already looks quite idio^H^H^H^H funny when playing wii with just one (or two) remote(s)... Imagine if you have to wiggle your whole body to play a game. Hi hi!...
This is actually a fairly cool bit of technology. My girlfriend recently got a crazy expensive webcam for herself. I don't know the model # off the top of my head but it is the one of their upper level models that has the Carl Zeiss Optical technology in it. Bundled with the camera comes face recognition and motion sensing software. It locks in on her face and when she moves around it follows her face so that she is never out of frame. It is actually quite accurate and rarely loses track of her.
Not sure how much people who would be using this with the XBOX would be moving around, but it is generally a pretty neat tech.
"I hope you know how very lucky you are to know me, because I am so incredibly incredible."
This will undoubtedly join the pantheon of stupid gaming ideas, alongside the Virtuaboy and PowerGlove
I think the reason this will work when the eyetoy didn't will boil down to subtle differences and the fact that it's on an XBox and not a PS2. The XBox has a pretty good following and if M$ can manage to properly market the device (as Nintendo did the Wii) I think they'll have enough success to keep the top slot a while longer. However, what they're working on has been in the lab for at least a decade now see BLUI for example... and that has nothing to do with Microsoft.
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I've never used Eyetoy or other webcam-based games, but somehow I don't think it could afford the same degree of responsiveness of the Wiimote. You can play rhythm-based games on Wii but I doubt this would be possible with a webcam. This isn't necessarily a bad thing but it does limit its possible uses.
You are wanking to unlicensed porn!
[buy license and continue playing porn] [abort wanking]
Two major problems with this possible system: First, it's just a camera. Without a full set of buttons on a controller that can be operated one-handed (or two hands with independent motion), you're stuck with waggle-only games and the Wii has already shown us how bad (or just plain frustrating) those can be.
Second, at this point in the console life cycle it's just another add-on with potential for a niche market at best. Unless there is massive developer support and or a large pack-in campaign, there simply won't be enough people with the hardware to justify developing many games for is.
So basically we're looking at another eye-toy, albeit one that can work in most rooms. Maybe Microsoft can come out and really surprise us with something amazing to add to what's already been tried before, but I'm not keeping my hopes too high for this one.
Someone bought me the Xbox camera already. Now I'm expected to buy anther camera so I can waggle my arms about like a moron to make something happen on screen?
I think perhaps Microsoft are forgetting two key points here. The 360 has a particular set of users that are unlikely to be that enthused about a motion capture camera. They can already go out and buy a Wii if they prefer to make their input without using a normal controller. Couple this with the fact that motion capture through a single fixed camera probably isn't going to be as spectacular as their press releases are going to make it sound. For these reasons and more, I'll not be putting this on my Christmas list thankyou very much.
You can advertise in this sig from as little as £99.99 a month!
There's a reason that even Hollywood still relies on external sensors for motion capture: machine vision is decades away from being able to do stuff like this. There is simply no way this will be any good, but then, I think that's part of the point: reinforce the 360 fanboys' perception that motion is bad by giving them a bad controller for motion.
It's exactly the same as this one, posted yesterday.
http://www.gizhq.com/2009/05/12/microsoft-working-on-a-motion-sensing-camera-for-the-xbox-360/
The Eyetoy may not be an absolute killer ap, but games for the device do actually sell pretty well. They're popular with kids and kinda fun.
Sony already has this in the form of the EyeToy. The issue here is not so much the camera, but the software behind it and more importantly how easy it is for games developers to take advantage of the intelligence provided.
There are plenty of examples of motion detection with cameras, but getting them to detect multiple moving objects, varying lighting conditions and so on is the challenge. I am not saying Microsoft will not succeed, I am simply saying that in many ways getting this to work perfectly is much more challenging than something like the Wiimote or the Wii Balance Board.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
It can sense the motion of the XBox through your window when you get another red ring. Sorry, E74.
That said, twenty XBox lifts every morning will do waaay more for muscle-building than Wii Fit. Thus proving Microsoft's inherent superiority!
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not only will I be able to tea bag noobs in halo I can give them a cam show while doing it!
... this concept of motion in front of a TV set. I thought television's primary application was to prevent all physical activity on the part of the viewer.
Have gnu, will travel.
I guess the tronguy will get lucky with this device http://www.tronguy.net/
isnt really something geared too well for xbox games...killers like halo and crew are not going to find much use i dont think
where was nintendo when it came to this? id love to see something like this for wii.
Good people go to bed earlier.
You mean soon I'll have to actually MOVE to play video games?
I remember sometime back on /. when WSJ was reporting rumors and the statement was basically the same: WTF WSJ? I thought they were supposed to be more tactful than that, or are they just trying to cope in a world where print is quickly dying (and the economic situation doesn't help either)?
Actually, the EyeToy is pretty good. The minigames it came with work quite well. And as to rhythm-based games, many of the DDR games can optionally add hand-movements to the dance, and that's a challenge (at least for me :-> ) but not because it's not sensitive enough. The game Antigrav is right on the edge of what the EyeToy can do, but if you have good lighting and a neutral background to provide good contrast, it's just fine.
The main problem is when you've got multiple people in-frame - that can confuse things. On the other hand, for many of the games that just means cheap co-op multiplayer. :->
With a higher-resolution camera and the 360's CPU, more advanced stuff should be possible... but then, Sony could do the same things.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Microsoft already released a camera more than two years ago. It even came with a came that was "motion controlled", although it was pretty flaky.
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5) Profit.
His "comments" here are mostly thinly disguised promotions for his monetized blog, and therefore can be qualified as nothing more than spam. The burning question on everyone's mind is, I think, whether or not it actually works. Hosting lemonparty.org (do an nslookup on it and davidgerard.co.uk) must be expensive, so a secondary source of income must be quite attractive to him.
While the camera in the wiimote points to the screen, Microsoft camera points at you !
Who knows what they'll do with the pictures ?
Votez ecolo : Chiez dans l'urne !
I'm happy to see that MS bought 3DV. 3DV has been promising that their camera will be available at scale for years. I talked to them at GDC a year and a half ago. "It'll be out this summer." "Who's your manufacturer?" "Oh, we don't have one yet. We'll just get someone in Taiwan or China to do it. Manufacturers are a dime a dozen."
So are companies with unbuildable products. I had to resist the urge to laugh in his face -- they didn't have their sh*t together in February and they'd have product on the shelves in the summer? I pretty much gave up hope on them then.
Which is too bad. They have a nice product -- not as good as Tyzx or PrimeSense, but theoretically it could be far less expensive.
Don't think of the EyeToy. That's a simple 2D differencing system, and not a very good one. I actually think it's a good product overall -- not enough so that I'd bother to buy one, but you could have fun with the right content. The vision system could be done better even with the harsh constraints (working in just about anyone's living room is surprisingly difficult.) But 2D images are fundamentally limited.
A depth-sensing camera like the Z-Cam, Tyzx, or PrimeSense can pick out gestures in front of your body, it can measure direction and acceleration in 3D, and it can pick players out from the background far better.
At the same time, our intuition was (and our experience found) that trying to convert camera input into controller input is just a bad idea. You don't want this for playing Halo 3. You need games built for camera input. It's fun for more than games, too -- we prototyped some nifty photo, video, and 3D model interfaces.
One of our most eyecatching prototypes was a light saber game where you could slice through oncoming hordes of robots. The video is dark and not very well done, sorry.
Wow! I also hear Microsoft is working on a file system...that's a DATABASE!