Project Natal
by skywardfire on Jun.02, 2009, under Industry, games
xbox 360 goodness by somberguy
For masses, E3 2009 started off with a bang set forth by the Microsoft keynote, the two biggest announcements of the same were Project Natal, and Metal Gear Solid coming to the Xbox 360. Project Natal is Microsoft’s very own Full Body 3D Motion Detection technology, that uses a 3D camera, and the SDK currently seems to support face recognition, voice recognition and fully body motion scanning in real-time. Project Natal is something straight out of what you might have seen in Minority Report, and the possibilities with this are endless. Check out the Keynote preview below.
The demo at the Keynote showed immense accuracy, specially while reading the limbs. But I have some major doubts regarding the same in my mind, which I’m sure the folks behind this are madly working to fix, most important of which is bringing down the manufacturing costs. Considering the fact that this is supposed to work with finger movement detection & detection of facial expressions of many people at the same time, the resolution and the processing capability needs to be massive. Come to think of it, finger detection is needs intense precision, and is very highly unlikely, at least for the time being.
Although, it’s just too early for this to hit the streets. With proper software backing, more hardware improvement & add-ons, and as mentioned before, bringing down the costs have a long way to go. For now, one can only say that demoing Project Natal was more of a marketing move. Being given the chance of opening up gaming’s most celebrated public events, Microsoft just had to overshadow competition, and build excitement & expectations that will be carried forward to E3 2010. And they’ve successfully done that. Gizmodo has a great gallery of the entire demonstration and a detailed report available here.
June 2nd, 2009 on 2:20 pm
From the well orchestrated live demo they gave during the keynote it was clear that the tech is still in its infancy. But the fact that something like this has even got to such a level is quite commendable! Surely it will atleast take a year for the thing to reach near completion.
Also, the VC introduced everyone to Project Natal saying that this is their plan to extend the consoles life, making them have the 360 to live for longer i.e So they wont be rushing it either
And that Gamekyo thing.. thats not THEIR preview
Thats just a cam vid record of the conference.
Hope you’ve checked out Stephen Totilo’s impressions at Kotaku of it in the brief demo he got an opportunity to take.
June 3rd, 2009 on 8:52 am
I think it’ll take more than a year to come any where near being perfect. We need more examples of fine-control from Natal to compare motion performance. At the moment, what I’ve seen places the motion control advantage with PS3, intuitiveness with Natal.
And thank you for the correction regarding the second video
June 3rd, 2009 on 7:23 pm
Get in the game – no controller required! Man if it really works like that then Wii will become obsolete the day Natal becomes available! But as you said it will require a whole lot of tweaking before that happens.
Also the other companies like SONY and Nintendo won’t just sit back and let Natal take over..they will also come up with some great stuff (PS eye and the likes).
Can’t wait to know more about this and one day play games on it! It would be so much fun!
June 4th, 2009 on 1:16 pm
couldn’t agree more. Eyepet from Sony looks rediculiously polished, but I’m not sure they have other teams working on similar (in production values) applications for PSeye, or their remote. MS seem to have a concrete idea of how they want to intergrate Natal into NXE. Sony are still figuring out what they want to do.