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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.
Xbox Project Natal : Felicia Day
"I can't wait to throw a fireball."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYuJivFFa-c
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.
After scanning this article, I'm kind of worried. Everyone's jumping into 3D immersive technology and that's great. Heck, I own a Wii myself ... but one thing I don't like about it is my inability to become really good at a game that relies on WiiMote motion. I don't know what the deal is but the learning curve seems really easy yet once you get there there is no way to differentiate between the 98 percentile player and the 99 percentile player. Now, I haven't gotten addicted to the WiiMote intensive games and I'm grateful that games like Super Smash Bros. don't rely on 3D motion of the WiiMote. It's just too complex and inaccurate. That said, this screenshot really worried me. No controller required or controller optional?
I welcome this new technology but as an avid gamer I'm more than a little bit afraid that with this new technology everyone is going to be expected to take advantage of it on the XBox360. We might be jumping into a new dimension too fast for software and hardware to support it. I know a lot of people would argue with that statement but Wii games feel 'soft' when they are WiiMote intensive and I wonder if Project Natal will feel the same way. Don't get me wrong, they are great games for four people to play while getting loaded.
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?
My work here is dung.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/6/5/
"SirWangALot hits you with his 'Pendulous Apendage of Pendulousnous' for 2 bashing damage, and you are afflicted with 'Point and Laugh Hysterically!' for 10 seconds.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
They could release an adult version of Project Natal that tracks 49 joints. That would make for a VERY interactive experience.
Im really looking forward to Natal, I think its one step closer to total immersion, however its not without problems. A wand or some sort of controller is still going to be needed to effectively "walk" in a game the only other way to do it would be to use some sort of gesture to glide the player along or to walk in place, neither of which is very practical. Using a gesture to walk forward in an FPS or RPG for instance would not only be awkward but would also completely destroy the "immersion" they are going for and anyone who has played Final Fantasy would balk at the idea of having to "moonwalk" your way across the map.
I can easily see it working in conjunction with a controller for those types of situations though and would still make the game more fun. The gesture recognition has me thinking about Fable 3, especially with Lionhead already playing with the technology. Fable 3 used a gesture menu that caused NPC's to react differently and say different things based on the "mood" or jesture your character portrayed. Just thinking about being able to talk (even with a limited amount of things be able to say) to the npc's, or to be able to sneer, growl or smile and get a reaction sounds extremely fun. I still see this as being a rather long way off but its undeniable that its a leap forward.
I had the pleasure of playing with a Z-Cam at last years CES, Natal is supposedly based partially on that and partially on something MS has been developing for years, the Z-Cam was already impressive, if with the melding of technology this is actually an improvement its going to be something to behold.
Haha, yeah, with multiplayer you can get punched out on screen AND in real life.
"iPhone-like fluidity"
gimmie a break. How and why did you manage to fit a reference to the iphone into the summary.
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 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.
Prepare to not getting a lot of visitors, then
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.
Kill all hipsters.
Project Natal adds a new dimension for your cat to bother you while playing games.
I think the issue is that game developers have had a few decades of hand-only input.
That explains how we got DOA beach volleyball...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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?
I agree! It's bad enough trying to turn "iPhone" into a generic noun to replace the perfectly good word we already have: phone - now we get to use it as an adjective? (Although perhaps we should - if successful, Apple lose their trademark!)
I honestly can't even fathom what he means by it - although I suppose it's true that Natal doesn't have a keyboard, and probably doesn't have copy/paste...
Anyhow, now I'm off to iPhone-like read the rest of the ipHone-like Slashdot on my iPHone-like computer (it can access web pages, see! Although mine has a keyboard).
I always see Natal being compared to MotionPlus and Sonys Motion sensing, but I think that isn't really correct. Both MotionPlus and Sonys solution feature more or less classic controllers, but with motion sensing added. Both of them also have heavy focus on wrist movement, while ignoring the rest of the body.
Natal on the other side features no controller at all, thus no buttons and analogsticks, making navigation through pretty much any normal game impossible or at least really cumbersome. On top of that Natal doesn't put emphasis on the wrist/hand, but on the whole body, so you lose a lot of the small movement precision that MotionPlus and Sonys solution have. So Natal really isn't an improvement over other motion sensing solution, as it can't do what those can.
So what is it? Pretty much the same thing as WiiFit or EyeToy, just in an improved form and those didn't exactly turn out as hardcore gamers best friends either. Natal will fail for the same reason. Positional information on where your arms and legs are just aren't enough for precise gameplay, you need buttons for that. Look for example at Ricochet, you have to punch the ball into the game instead of doing the more natural thing of throwing it. Why? Because there is nothing in Natal that could give the game a clear idea when the player let the virtual ball go.
Unless somebody comes up with some actual interesting gameconcepts instead of the full-body-waggle, that Ricochet is, I remain highly skeptical on the future of Natal. At this point it looks like an interesting techdemo, not like a way to control future games.
Natal might be the first step towards the next gaming revolution, but so was the Powerglove, that alone doesn't turn it into a useful peripheral.
>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.
Sony and Microsoft battled it out over pixel pushing, while Nintendo actually innovated (something Microsoft talks about a lot but never does) and built something new that people really liked -- something that actually got non-gamers onto the scene.
When Sony or Microsoft do what you praise Nintendo for, it's bad? Their technology is clearly innovative and different to the Wii.
The fact is they can have their high end processing power and graphics, and fun motion controls on top of that. They'll probably be better able to utilise them because of that power and make more fun games that wouldn't be possible with the Wii's hardware limitations. As someone interested in games, and not Sacred Nintendo's market share, it seems like a good thing to me.
[/Wii owner]
http://video.google.com/videosearch?hl=en&safe=off&q=microsoft%20e3&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=wv#
Seriously, has anyone actually paid attention to the stage demo?
Take a look at the first bit with Ridiculous Sunglasses Guy and his avatar - he makes little, uncomplicated poses and the avatar twists itself into pretzels.
It's _extremely_ glitchy.
Then they change to the girl playing ricochet, which is something like 500+ ms lagged and it seems clearly impossible to control with any kind of precision. The lag indicates to me that they are using a tremendous amount of smoothing to try and avoid some serious jitter problems.
It looks like it will fall as short of their glitzy marketing video promise as the wii controller did.
Any game that is not frustrating to control with this technology will basically be playing itself with small cues from you.
I think it's great that there is work being done in these areas, but I am just astounded that so many people are so readily regurgitating the marketing promises for this technology, when they can even demonstrate it halfway convincingly under completely controlled conditions.
Give me liberty or give me kill -s 9
By watching:
- all that "movie magic" (as one put it) in the non-live demos
- the highly choreographed demos given on stage
- Microsoft saying this is a very early in development
- Microsoft saying there is no shipping date
- the Milo video suggests a very capable AI far beyond what we could expect today, with reactions to facial expressions and broad-domain speech recognition
- how Vista looked great in that early video when it was called Longhorn and what a dog it is.
I call it bullshit.
This is Microsoft showing a non-product in order to damage sales of its competitors who are selling obviously less-advanced technology (of course - because they can ship a real product right now) than the fantasies they depict in their promotional videos.
Wake me up when they have a product.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
I can't trust anything associated with Peter Molyneux anymore. The man has over-hyped some of his games as a mighty revolution in gaming; the released product then falls far short(Black and White, Fable). This article is just a part of that hype machine rolling on.
I'd love to be proven wrong, but I'll believe this when I see it.
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.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
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.
"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.
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