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Details On Natal's Motion Capture Technology
An anonymous reader writes "Following yesterday's announcement of a late 2010 launch date for Natal, more details are emerging on exactly how Natal works. Alex Kipman, the project's lead developer, explains that Natal uses only 10-15% of the Xbox's resources to calibrate to a new player inside 160 milliseconds, track one or two players simultaneously, and use rudimentary knowledge of body anatomy to estimate where hands or other body parts are even when they can't be seen by Natal — for instance when they are held behind the back."
Here is a tech demo showing a Peter Molyneux demonstration of a game using Natal.
The ramifications of a system like this are pretty important I think. Honestly, this is what I had hoped the Wii would become... Not to start a Wii controller vs. Natal debate or anything, but I feel like games using full body motion capture would be much more interesting to me. At the end of the day, when I tried to play Wii tennis using proper motions and what not, I felt like an idiot after looking over and seeing someone else accomplish the same thing by flicking their wrist.
That said, I am interested to see how finely grained the sensitivity will be tuned to Natal recognizing people and motions. IE: if person A is playing a single player game and person B walks up and makes a hand motion, will Natal disregard that motion, or will it do whatever person B did? If so, it could seriously dent the efficacy of games being played by one person... Part of the benefit of having a physical controller is that someone else has to take it from you when they want to play, haha!