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Sony Demos Natal-Like Control System
An anonymous reader writes "It's not just Microsoft investigating full body, markerless motion capture. Sony has enlisted the help of Swiss firm Atracsys to develop similar technology. Sony has openly discussed the technology with New Scientist, and has realistic expectations for the new system — it can capture broad body gestures but not individual fingers. That's just one trade-off needed in order to develop a real-time system that anyone can use, according to a markerless motion-capture expert."
It's still in the early stages of development, but the accompanying video shows the use of face-recognition software as well. The demo game has players moving their heads left or right to position their character, and then smiling to "catch" an object.
Project Natal running on PlayStation 2 , 5 years ago
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYHr0I-iFHE
What's next on Slashdot? Microsoft 'invents' open source software development?
Huh. Sounds grate.
So that means, not only are they going to rip off Nintendo, There going to rip off Microsoft too?
So now the PS3 can tell you look like an idiot while swinging the lighted Bingo Dauber around. Nice.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
Sony demoed this system at the same show Natal was announced at. Both Microsoft and Sony were trying to come up with answers to the Wii.
Microsoft's system is, if you think about it, pretty clunky. It can't recognize fingers either (or it didn't at the demo).
Sony's is a little better, in that at least you have a controller with real buttons to denote actions.
But I think both, are in the end not as good as the Wii system, where you can sit on the couch and play if you want instead of requiring a rather large clear area right in front of the TV set, just where most people have coffee tables laden with remote controls and magazines...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Project Natal running on PlayStation 2 , 5 years ago
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jYHr0I-iFHE
from Natal. Here's why: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/6/5/
weinersmith
" Sony Copied MS with achievements."
LOL!
What an idiot! They're call 'Skill Points' and they were first invented by Sony and Insomniac games all the way back in the late 1990s.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbWBU2Kezj0
"You've earned a Skill Point"
Microsoft ripped it off and renamed it.
"Sony Copied Nintendo with motion control "
Sony had motion controls in games going all the way back to the early PS2 days. Long before Nintendo jumped on the motion control bandwagon.
Way to make yourself look like a retarded fanboy Nerdfest!
Couldn't agree more!
I'm getting a bit sick of the stupid bashing of companies for "copying", the entire damn business of ANYTHING has copied the competition in some form.
Worse is when people do shit like this and try make the original (or anyone previous) inventor seem as if THEY copied.
Natal couldn't be any more of a copycat of Eyetoy, they should just slap Xbox Eyetoy on the damn box.
I'm not trolling, i'm just being truthful.
But i'm not bashing the system at all. It is a nice system. The paint demo especially was pretty impressive.
I don't know why Sony felt the need to go out to some company, the Eyetoy team are more than capable.
"From what I've seen of these skill points, Their pretty much the same thing as getting the hidden world stars in Mario 64, only you get a star instead of an extra life."
"You've earned a skill point"
"Acheivement unlocked"
LOL!
Yeah, Microsoft's ripoff of Sony's skill points is just like 'collecting hidden stars'...
What a fucking loser.
Smiling to catch the object? That makes the game way too difficult for me.
Here's a picture I drew of two people having sex while they're both in the woman's panties. I thought the expression on her face was pretty funny. Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Please mod this up if you enjoyed my picture, or if you like the fact that I think Linux is better than Windows.
http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/9705/unh1.jpg
That's a pretty good likeness of you fucking your mom.
Is detecting a smile that much more useful than what they already had with the eyeToy last generation?
When you are spending 2-3 times as much for your console
Compared to what? I play to own the PS3 for about ten years, playing online games as part of that. You buy the PS3 once and in the end the games are costing a lot more than the console, plus there are no recurring fees and you get a Blu-Ray player too.
If you are comparing to a 360, you are a damn dirty hypocrite since you'll be paying more than me after just a year or two, and if you wanted to watch Blu-Ray discs ever are really running up a tab.
If you own a Wii, carry on (except for the Blu-Ray point of course).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Just think of all the hilarious motions going un-captured!
... and then they built the supercollider.
Natal is part of South Africa, and is the homeland of the Zulu.
Maybe I'm looking through rose-tinted glasses, but I seem to remember this funny little thing that games used to be defined by. I can't remember the word for it... oh yeah. They were Fun. I can live without these new-fangled gimmicks. I don't see games being any more fun with the Natal system than with the Wiimote, nor do I see them being any more fun with Sony's system. The concepts are neat, but they just don't seem efficient. The focus is turning away from good games and more toward gimmicky games.
I'll admit, the Wiimote is gimmicky, but Nintendo hasn't forgotten what Fun is.
never forget, never forgive
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/sony_rootkit
Welcome to the future of gaming! Have fun with your friends while you stagger around like zombies! Please take a look at the feature video and behold the faces of the players! Yes! That's a smile right there! Sony brings joy to your life. Ain't that game great?
And it's the only game you actually get better the more Jager's you kill.
The microsoft version is using Israeli military technology, it's not just a webcam. Or it is a webcam, but it's also something else.
A small time before the camera sends another frame downstream a small led in front of the camera flashes. That flash has a specific color, that's rarely seen in nature. Then it resets one layer of the CMOS camera. Then, a short while later the frame is sent downstream ... with 4 color components.
You have your superstandard red, green and blue channels. And you get a depth channel. The last channel indicates how long a time passed between the flashing of the led and that pixel seeing the color emanated by the led.
In all but the most extreme situations (there are a few extreme angles that don't work as expected, a few materials that are not opaque to the sent-out color, and there's a minimum and maximum distance, which aren't stellar, as well as limitations on how many such camera's can be active at once, as they have to timeshare), that would be the distance between the eye of the camera and whatever object the pixel was on.
Natal does not give you a 2d image, it gives you a 2.5d image (meaning x,y + height, not truly independent x,y,z coordinates), but still. The difference between normal pictures and natal pictures is like the difference between mario bros and duke nukem 3d.
Natal is the combination of a camera + a (relatively short-range) 3d range scanner. That equipment doesn't really exist yet, and while camera's are cheap, I seriously doubt you can find a 2d range scanner running at 60 Hz for less than 50.000$.
Its research is already being called "Natal-Like".
Hate MS or Like MS, they already got their mindshare with a really cool project.
OTOH, If they dont research it and develop it, SCE will be regarded as a thing of the past.
Z-Cam signed an exclusive deal with Microsoft to make their time-of-flight camera a device for X-Box only. Natal is based on depth images.
The thing shown in the video is face tracking in camera images (plus some classification algorithm to detect face expressions). Tracking is probably done using Gary Bradski's Camshift algorithm and you can read about how it works in his paper.
doesn't really invent anything, they're more of a jack of all trades, bringing technology together from other players.