Why Natal Is a Big Deal

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.

Comments

"I can't wait to throw a fireball."

[dalmiroy2k]

Xbox Project Natal : Felicia Day
"I can't wait to throw a fireball."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYuJivFFa-c

Re:"I can't wait to throw a fireball."

[onion2k]

Excellent video demonstration of why Natal *will fail* (at least in the UK and Japan). Land is much less of a scarce resource in the USA so houses can have big open areas, but in countries with a higher population density people's houses just don't have that much space. Unless Microsoft can persuade people to rearrange their living spaces to make room by removing coffee tables, buying smaller sofas, etc Natal just won't be accessible for many people.

Re:"I can't wait to throw a fireball."

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone obviously never discovered you can play wii sports golf sitting down and swinging the wii-mote over your head. Although in all seriousness I do have quite a large / empty living room (for the UK), and a few of the more enthusiastic wii games do have space issues, there have been more than one wii tennis related injury in my household, also having a £1000 TV on the wall makes one a bit apprehensive about getting "too involved"

Re:"I can't wait to throw a fireball."

[Eponymous Crowbar]

That's cool, but perhaps a tennis-based Natal game could be tuned to respond to simple flicks of the wrist instead of depending on an overhead slam motion? I would expect something along those lines.

Re:"I can't wait to throw a fireball."

[kklein]

Here's a little N=1 for you, but I really enjoy Wii Sports (are there any other games for the Wii?), but my wife and I don't have one because we live in Japan, and even though we have the biggest place of any of my friends, there just isn't enough space for it to be fun.

The Gamertag Report

[Drakkenmensch]

I could see myself controlling my Xbox interface like Tom Cruise in Minority Report. Granted it wouldn't add much to the functionality, but damn if that wouldn't be the coolest gadget ever.

Re:The Gamertag Report

[slashmojo]

Well you could go to the local martial arts center to spar with a real opponent but that also comes with drawback of real brain damage when you get kicked in the head! ;)

At least with the xbox you only have to worry about 'trivial' stuff like pulled muscles and heart attacks - unless players start trying back flips or something.

Somehow I foresee many lawsuits coming out of project natal..

Looks awesome though.

Re:The Gamertag Report

[WCLPeter]

I'm much more interested in Milo and the potential for a personal assistant.

Wouldn't it be nice to come home and say something like, "Good afternoon Milo, did I get any new messages?" and then have him give me an itemized listing. Throw in some call display, my contact list, and the apparently impressive speech recognition, I could have something very unique and personal, "Hey Peter, welcome home. Your mom called, twice, and your sister wants to know if you're going to dinner with her and the kids next Saturday."

Of course, being a geek, I'd want my assistant to look and sound like Lexa Doig. ;-)

Mouse?

[robvangelder]

If this technology is as good as it sounds, this spells the end of the mouse.
Seriously, my mousepad could be a touchpad.

Would probably need a thimble to avoid friction burn though.

Re:Mouse?

[Colonel Korn]

If this technology is as good as it sounds, this spells the end of the mouse.
Seriously, my mousepad could be a touchpad.

Would probably need a thimble to avoid friction burn though.

The resolution isn't remotely close to being able to replace a mouse. Why do we use mice instead of touch screens?

1) They allow us to interact with our screens with our hands in a neutral position. A simplified and reengineered Natal could do this.

2) They allow us to move across a thousand pixels with only an inch of movement. It's going to be awhile before the precision of the mouse comes to motion recognition. Even then, motion recognition tends to have small jitter, and if it sees my hand with less than 0.001" precision (not that I can even keep my hand still on that length scale), the cursor will jump around.

Re:Mouse?

[qchan]

This technology seems kinda fake to me. If you refer back to E3 where they first showcased the device, there were several odd and unexplained things going on. 1) The twitchy avatar character shown (especially when the guy tried to show the bottom of his shoe and couldn't.) seemed to show that the technology wasn't really complete. 2) The other presenters wore dark clothing that seemed to contrast better with their surroundings. Yet, the people in the promotional video wore more colorful clothing. 3) The device only seemed to be able to detect only wide movement and not subtle movement like the promotional video suggested. 4) Most core gamers would like to take advantage of this technology. However, most gamers like to play in dark rooms. It seems to me that it'll be more difficult for this camera to adjust to harsh lighting conditions (dark rooms, lens flare, moving background lights, etc.). 5) It didn't feel as though the camera could decipher between more than one person, because no one (presenters or journalist in the closed room) tried to test it with that in mind. Sure it could detect more than one person; but could it tell the difference between the two? 6) Where are the games that utilize this technology? It seemed that all that was available were tech demos. I'd very much like to see this technology put to use in actual real time environments instead of controlled environments. It gives me the sense that this project is a little premature and may not see the light of day for a long time.

Re:Only 48 Joints?

[Anonymous Coward]

Definately. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7ajqsZSglU&feature=player_embedded

Depth sensing camera

[Anonymous Coward]

The project Natal is indeed different for an Eye tool of a wii mote. This is a depth sensing camera (you have a RGB image and an image with the distance to the camera). This camera is made by Primesense (you can check theirs patents), it works by projecting a grid (infrared so you can't see it). By analyzing the deformed pattern with a camera, the depth is computed.
Having the deep information is really useful because you get the 3d cloud of the user and with some math, you can guess where is the user and what he is doing. For example you can find the biggest cluster of point (the user). The mass center of these points will give you the position of the user (this is already enough to to a lot of thing).
But the technology is not perfect. It will never be a full replacement for motion capture because it's subject to occlusions and there are a lot of ambiguous cases so the system will always need to cheat.

Re:Depth sensing camera

[Timmmm]

"This camera is made by Primesense (you can check theirs patents), it works by projecting a grid (infrared so you can't see it). By analyzing the deformed pattern with a camera, the depth is computed."

Wrong on two counts. Firstly, the Primasense camera works using speckle imaging, not by triangulating a projected pattern. Secondly Natal actually uses technology from 3DV Systems which uses infrared time-of-flight to measure distance.

Re:Endurance Gaming?

[pankkake]

Exactly. I watched their commercial (it's not a demo, it's a commercial, and everything is faked) and when I saw the girl "driving" with her hands in the air it hit me : I couldn't last five minutes with this game. When you drive your hands are not in the air, the rest on the wheel. This product is incredibly stupid, and like Surface it will never exist in real life.

What about people with disabillities?

[MaXMC]

Say you only got one arm? or One leg?
Will Natal still work correctly?

EA: Sports 2010
Requirements: Xbox 360, Natal system, no physical disabilites

What happens if I stand just behind my friend and it looks like we have four arms? Will Natal work that out?

Infra-red is a color, you nitwit.

[Cordath]

"Natal does not track players by colour (although we know from Milo commenting on my blue shirt that it can if it wants to); it tracks them by infra-red "

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. There are several mistakes like this in that article, and the continual invoking of "magic" is particularly bad. There is quite a fair bit known about how Natal works. If you somehow missed it at E3, look it up slacker! If you really want to persuade people, sound like you were paying attention at E3 for chrissake.

As for addressing the claim that hardcore gamers don't want to jump around in front of their couch rather than sitting on it and twiddling their thumbs...

Fail.

There's something truly awesome about sitting back, taking a piece of clunky plastic in your hands, and gaming the night away with some good ol' fashioned haptic feedback. Maybe Natal is precise enough to read your finger positions without needing a controller, but it still can't give you tactile feedback. Incidentally, spinning your hands in the air to control a car is actually a step further away from total immersion as compared to spinning a steering wheel in the air, because real cars have steering wheels!

Don't get me wrong. Natal is still an epic achievement, but hardcore gamers should probably realize it's more for their mothers than them. Take a look at the Wii. It's sort of a gimmick. A lot of people get one, play it for a couple months, and then pull it out only for parties. Why just parties? For one thing, it has a lot of games that are easy to learn and offer little advantage to the master, meaning almost anyone can win by the end of a session. It's also fundamentally enjoyable watching people spaz out in front of the thing before they realize it's all in the wrist. Given the Wii's relative lack of depth, why has it outsold the PS3 and Xbox360 combined several times over? Broad appeal. Your mom doesn't see the point of yet another game about saving Master Chief's undies from alien zombies, but air-golfing? Score.

Look at how MS operates and you'll figure out what's going on here pretty quick. Natal isn't the next generation of hardcore gaming. It's the Internet explorer of casual gaming come to dethrone Nintendo's Netscape. The Wii showed Sony and MS how monolithically massive the casual gaming market is, and now they want in. Natal is a slash aimed squarely at Nintendo's jugular, and they're going to have to innovate our pants off and then fellate us to stay in business.

So, will Natal ever do anything for hardcore gaming? I don't know. Natal, or something like it, will someday. It really is in the hands of the software developers though. I applaud MS for giving us a whole new bag of tricks, but I honestly don't expect a hardcore gaming Nirvana to come out of the mist like the author of that article does. I expect Wii-type gimmicky crap that will be a whole lot of fun at parties, and for your mom, but not that fantastic for late night fragging. Emotional AI and speech recognition is bloody impressive, but Turing test passing AI is still very bloody hard stuff. They can put this stuff into games, but at some point you'll probably feel like you're trapped in a world full of Dr.Sbaitso's. Scripted dialogue trees (Mass effect is a great example of doing those well) aren't going to go away for quite some time. In reality, the tools MS is giving us will take years or decades to refine on the software side of things. Existing input methods, like mice or gamepads, have been around for several decades and are heavily optimized. They're not going to be replaced in one generation.

Natal is already flushed

[HikingStick]

Relying on cameras and sensors, the players are still stowed if something crosses between them and the sensors. At least with the Wii, if you see someone coming, you can raise the Wiimote or slide it to the side. If Natal is watching your whole body, and someone needs to cross in front of you to get to the bathroom (or if a large dog or smaller siblings come into the play space), you're stowed. Until they describe how they will compensate for environmental disruptions, I'll put this in the "useless hype" category.

I'm not saying the tech isn't cool, and I definately can see uses for it (the manipulation of 3D models alone would be awesome), but you're more likley to find uses for this in commerce and industry where dedicated manipulation zones can be established. Of course, it would also work if the game system is in someone's bedroom or another space where no one will bother the player, but those households are not going to be as broad an audience as that reached by the Wii. Hardcore gamers do have funds to spend, and I'm sure many will buy, but they will hit a market saturation point.