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Checking In On Project Natal
itwbennett writes "A couple of interesting articles followed Robbie Bach's announcement at CES that Project Natal, Microsoft's controller-free Xbox 360 control system, will be shipping in time for the 2010 holiday season, writes blogger Peter Smith. First, Popular Science has a nice look at how Project Natal works, focusing mostly on the software and how 'Microsoft engineers are teaching the Natal 'brain' what various parts of the human body look like so that Natal can tell your ascot from your elbow.' Microsoft is staying mum on the hardware, although Smith notes that we know it involves an infrared camera. 'If you don't care about how the tech works but just want to know if it'll be worth buying,' writes Smith, 'you might be interested in an interview with Robbie Bach in the Financial Post. In the interview Bach claims that 70%-80% of Xbox 360 developers are working on some kind of Natal-enabled gaming software, and he assures us that first-party studios are also hard at work.'"
Motion controls have been around for a long time and there is no reason for them to ever go away. Nintendo goes all the way back to the PowerGlove and Sony goes back to the early PS2 days with motion controls.
Microsoft finally jumping on the motion control bandwagon is the exception. They need something to try to salvage the 8 billion dollars they've wasted on the Xbox fiasco. Trying a Hail Mary Wii strategy(motion controls bolted on old hardware) with Sony type(Eye/EyeToy) motion technology is pretty much the only option left for them in the console market.
The Xbox 360 is dead in Japan and Europe outside of the UK just like the first Xbox marketplace failure. After the billions wasted on their failed attempts at consoles with the Xbox and Xbox 360, Microsoft really has no other option than just giving up on the who mess and going back to focusing on Windows PC gaming.
The absolutely disastrous reaction to Microsoft's motion controls so far is an amazing contrast to the incredible hype and excitement Nintendo had with the Wii. Nintendo had games everyone wanted to play with a controller that actually worked and could be used by the general public. So far Microsoft has everyone who seen tech coming away with the question why would anyone want to use this poorly implemented tech.
Maybe Microsoft can finally get their act together and avoid the humiliation of last year's E3 where they were caught by the gaming media faking their motion control demos. But so far Microsoft only has laggy tech that can't seem to find a single game that anyone would want to play with it.