Project Natal: MS Full Body 3D Motion Detection

[Silent_Buddha]

There will be an unbelievable amount of wanking on xbox live.

LoL, there's the entire possibility that certain avatar movements would be disabled. Or at least attempts made to prevent the avatar from making certain motions.

Then again, humans if anything are innovative and I'm sure someone will always find a way around something like that to make some sort of rude or inappropriate gesture in a game rated for all ages.

Regards,
SB

 

[Shifty Geezer]

There will be an unbelievable amount of wanking on xbox live.

That is the concern. See any community game.site and you have people trying exploits to get sexual poses, even when none exists. That's one reason to limit them. Home is completely dead to me, in considerable part because there's no huamn presence. Particular, go into the bowling arena and it's silent. It *feels* empty. But they can't enable voice chat for all, because people would abuse it. I don't know how that could be filtered out, but IMO online communities need it. At least, to appeal to me. Some communities get by fine with just text.

 

[liolio]

If you see the concern how did you miss how this relates to guitar strumming or really anything with small manual dexterity?

You want other examples?

OK I play guitar keeping track of what a guitarist is doing is tough even when you're just standing next to him. You can grab more than one string with one finger, Finger can hide another, Sweeping and raking are waful to keep track of even "for real". And the right hand... it will be a while before any costumer space system can track my right hand while playing and I'm not good,
movement are damned fast and the amplitude vary but is pretty tiny.

pulling a gun trigger

I think it will prove impossible especcially as the forefinger faces the camera and doesn't movethat much. It would be could but ry for yourself, when trying to be fast pam apampam half my finger is moving and the end of my finger moves barely a centimeter. I think it's an unrealistic expectation even if the sytem do well.

lock picking

Could be done depending on how well hands and wrist are tracked.

typing

That would be could but that's expecting ubber precision, a bit unrealistic too.

pointing

I'm pretty sure it can be done, I explained how in another thread.

fingers used as counters

That could be done for some easy to track positions. It again depends on what the system can be ask, can devs ask the thing to send xenon the part of the RGB picture where the hand are? If yes it's possible the same way the psp can recognize a star in the augemented reality game Sony push out.

directing troops in a combat game

same as above, I'll add that Ms have to use a correct rgb camera (that works as intended in various light conditions.

any fine movements

Too much sensitivity would not be that great, people move without notice and slightly trembling, etc anyway the game WOULD have to dismiss this as noise (back to guitar example some pull off hamer on could easily qualify.
Overall a lot of this concern are tigh imho to how good/reliable the rgb camera is and to Natal software flexibility. Personnaly I would want the sytem to be able to recognize some simple hand positions (military style, open, closed, thumb sticking out, forefinger sticking out, nothing to fancy but that would give so many more options).
If Ms isn't able to pull something like that the sytem will severly crippled and that would be dumb as it's possible without the extra hardware they have at hand.

 

[Acert93]

That is the concern. See any community game.site and you have people trying exploits to get sexual poses, even when none exists. That's one reason to limit them. Home is completely dead to me, in considerable part because there's no huamn presence. Particular, go into the bowling arena and it's silent. It *feels* empty. But they can't enable voice chat for all, because people would abuse it. I don't know how that could be filtered out, but IMO online communities need it. At least, to appeal to me. Some communities get by fine with just text.

MS has a patent for realtime bleeping of curse words.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Can it be extended to bleeping dodgy poses and virtual molestations? Oh, and does it work?! Great idea and it'd be nice to have, but then again one can be quite inappropriate without resorting to potty-mouthing. And then we can have too much censorship, like Sony's primitive **** in the PSN chat. Talking Sacred 2 classes ended up talking Sacred 2 Cl*****! We still don't know why Peter or whatever name it was is censored!

 

[rpg.314]

This is MS doing to consoles what Apple did to phones. It may not be perfect, but IMHO, ms should not have demoed it w/o a serious show of games, interface and launch info.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Can it be extended to bleeping dodgy poses and virtual molestations? Oh, and does it work?! Great idea and it'd be nice to have, but then again one can be quite inappropriate without resorting to potty-mouthing. And then we can have too much censorship, like Sony's primitive **** in the PSN chat. Talking Sacred 2 classes ended up talking Sacred 2 Cl*****! We still don't know why Peter or whatever name it was is censored!

It could be as simple as another privacy setting on live. Maybe you could turn off Natal avatar from anyone but people on your friends list. Seems like it would be a good idea. They already have the same for voice chat, I think, but I've left it all public.

 

[obonicus]

depth accuracy of 3D camera is centimetric not millimetric. you can't realy dissociate and track finger or part of visage with this accuracy i think

Yeah, I was going to add that Tsunoda isn't an engineer, so take whatever he says with a grain of salt, but I've been trying not to be too negative in this thread.

 

[22psi]

This is MS doing to consoles what Apple did to phones. It may not be perfect, but IMHO, ms should not have demoed it w/o a serious show of games, interface and launch info.

Why not? It's the talk of the show, press and on the most prominent video game forums. It did its job. Now MS needs to bust ass to make it mass consumerable.

 

[Inquisitive_Idiot]

Why not? It's the talk of the show, press and on the most prominent video game forums. It did its job. Now MS needs to bust ass to make it mass consumerable.

Yeah, I wonder what they are going to do to market this device? If its really expensive it might be hard to bundle it with games like EA and Nintendo are doing with Wii Motion +. They definitely need to get third parties on board, but I doubt that is going to be a problem for MS, it just up their own first party studio's and third party efforts to develop interesting games.

 

[zRifle1z]

The ....snip


So currently no finger-tracking, but '[Tsunoda] thought my fingers idea was do-able'.

Sorry for the poor quality video. Watch the players thumbs as he controls the plane.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=233hzDgkwWM&feature=related

EDIT:

Here's another one
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8szDX1jI0vI&feature=related

And another one
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zd9_VuqEymk&feature=related

I'd say with time finger gestures are possible.



AzBat, great videos by the way.

 

[catisfit]

And then we can have too much censorship, like Sony's primitive **** in the PSN chat. Talking Sacred 2 classes ended up talking Sacred 2 Cl*****!

That's clbuttic

 

[_phil_]

I'd say with time finger gestures are possible.

it'aslo very related to distance to camera.one meter or less in your videos.

 

[Arwin]

I loved the interview on Eurogamer where Microsoft detailed the parameters for Natal. It basically rounds out for me how the technology works in principle. The camera can scan its full field of view in 5 frames, generating a point cloud similar to how for instance environments can be digitally scanned by laser these days. It uses this to find the body. Then it focusses on the body and generates a new point cloud which instead of wasting a lot of time and points on the whole field of view, now shows mostly the body. This information is mapped to a predefined skeletal framework that has 48 joints, to determine the body posture of the player in 3d. From here on, it will keep focussing on the body solely and compare each new 'frame' / point-cloud with the previous position, to determine several parameters for the joints, like position, speed and direction of movement, and also how accurate the software in the camera doing the analys thinks this information is ('confidence' per Eurogamer's own interview). It gives back this information at 30 frames per second apparently (also per the Eurogamer interview).

As for finger gestures, yes, they should be possible, but only if the SDK allows you to either read the point cloud directly, or supports mapping to something different from the 48 joint thing, OR, the fingers are already included in that 48 joint thing.

Anyone care to speculate on what that number 48 means in this context? Is it 48 because that matches the human bodies basic joints?

Googling gave me this (although there may be some disagreement on what is a real joint, this list I found has a total of 360 which is very funny):

Skull joints: 86
Throat joints: 6
Thorax joints: 66
Spine and Pelvis joints: 76
Upper limbs: 32 x 2 = 64
Lower limbs: 31 x 2 = 62

Now the question is which ones does Natal track? I think we may be able to figure out from watching some of that ball-game gameplay

 

[Crossbar]

The Eurogamer interview was informative indeed.

I can´t help think that the Burnout demo is pretty stupid. Controlling gas/brake by moving the leg forward/backward would hardly work in my living-room where we have a table between the sofa and the TV. Would we need to move the table every time we would like to race using Natal? The Mariokart wheel seems like a much better solution for casual gaming where you also have precise button control for gas/brake.

 

[Arwin]

The Eurogamer interview was informative indeed.

I can´t help think that the Burnout demo is pretty stupid. Controlling gas/brake by moving the leg forward/backward would hardly work in my living-room where we have a table between the sofa and the TV. Would we need to move the table every time we would like to race using Natal? The Mariokart wheel seems like a much better solution for casual gaming where you also have precise button control for gas/brake.

Another suggestion was to use moving your hands forward and backward for accelleration and braking. I could see that working.

 

[goonergaz]

Another suggestion was to use moving your hands forward and backward for accelleration and braking. I could see that working.

not really IMHO, you can imagine it would pick up movements unintended or maybe you're adjusting your position in your chair and it might ruin your race?

 

[Crossbar]

Another suggestion was to use moving your hands forward and backward for accelleration and braking. I could see that working.

It probably would, nevertheless it takes away the "natural feel" that´s been touted. A good side effect of that kind of exercise would be that it would prevent people to game for to long time without break, which isn´t healthy anyways.

 

[Arwin]

To be honest, I think it's a lot more likely that for 'proper' driving games we'll see you using the controller for braking and accelleration, and then you can steer by twisting the controller much like sixaxis allows now, and then maybe with added head-tracking for looking left and right as well as gestures for shifting (again, optional) and handbraking (optional). Something like that. For some things you just need buttons, and you just need to hold something. This is not going to be the area where Natal is going to excell I think - just holding your arms up is exhausting by itself, you'll already need to lean them on your knees or something very soon. Sixaxis steering worked well for me because in the end I needed only very subtle movements and could do it even in just one hand, still using R2 for accelleration (and x for boost). But if Natal could just bring headtracking to a game like Forza 3, that alone would be a big win for me. I really like that technology, especially in a cockpit view.

 

[Quaz51]

not really IMHO, you can imagine it would pick up movements unintended or maybe you're adjusting your position in your chair and it might ruin your race?

yes and it would be hard to delimit the neutral point