Old Discussion Thread for all 3 motion controllers

[fehu]

You must have inhuman perception in order to get that from a 15fps mobile phone video. Let's wait until we see it running in a better video before making those kind of observations.

geometry wars is good enought, and in half life you can see him move the hand and after a second or so move the camera

 

[fehu]

What about natal chipless now, and natal2 at next console's launch with new chip now economic to produce?
So you can use new natal on new and old games, and actual natal on 360 and on 720 only on old games via emulation.

 

[Rangers]

They got the rumor of the PSP Go's look right, for instance.

They actually copied that directly from a much smaller website. The Go's image, I mean.

They may have broke the story that it would be "Go" branded, I cant remember exactly.

 

[ShadowRunner]

What about natal chipless now, and natal2 at next console's launch with new chip now economic to produce?
So you can use new natal on new and old games, and actual natal on 360 and on 720 only on old games via emulation.

Would make more sense the other way around. Next gen cpu rescources could be reserved specifically for natal so that developers are not having to make potentially large sacriffices to enable natal features. If natal does come chipless this gen it means there will be no way to patch in support for older games but also that to introduce optional natal features the whole game may suffer. It wont be a problem for natal only games but for something like a new Halo that has cool little natal features but which are optional and not critical to the game it may not make sense to the developers to include them if the core game would suffer. Of course it would depend on the sacrifice that needs to be made, we dont know what sort of processing power is required by natal.

 

[ShadowRunner]

They actually copied that directly from a much smaller website. The Go's image, I mean.

They may have broke the story that it would be "Go" branded, I cant remember exactly.

I think he meant thier comment about the Go using a similar shell to one of Sonys mobile phone models, the Mylo from what i remember.

 

[obonicus]

I think he meant thier comment about the Go using a similar shell to one of Sonys mobile phone models, the Mylo from what i remember.

Right.

 

[patsu]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/n...ted-in-ps3-wand-for-third-person-action-games

Naughty Dog's Evan Wells has said he won't be making an Uncharted-style game for the PS3 wand any time soon.

He'd rather do 'a Nintendo' and design for and around the motion-sensor - an approach he believes the PlayStation crowd would lap up.

 

[grandmaster]

Perhaps the E3 demo used an early prototype of the Natal device with the custom processor inside it. Hence why it would have been relatively quick and easy for them to patch Burnout with it without making extensive changes to the game code.

They could have very recently decided to forgo the custom processor for cost reasons, given that the thing won't release till late this year, it's still very possible that much regarding the hardware specifications of the device aren't yet on lock.

As far as I am aware, Natal processing in the demo is done on the PC, which may explain the approx. 200ms lag I encountered. If Natal doesn't have the custom processor in the camera, I see this as both negative and positive. Games will need to be designed especially for the hardware (no comedy "bolt on" support for the peripheral a la SixAxis) but at the same time obviously there will be less CPU time for the game once the control system has had its "cut".

But this is going to be a big "if" really... but it kinda makes sense. Affordability is probably more important than the ability to patch older games that won't really appeal to the new Natal owner any way.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

Have MS said anything about 3D? Of all the controls, seems to me Natal is best suited for 3D immersion. Reaching out to grab a 3D ball etc. seems a better fit in a controllerless interface than doing the same with a 2D image.

 

[Crossbar]

Have MS said anything about 3D? Of all the controls, seems to me Natal is best suited for 3D immersion. Reaching out to grab a 3D ball etc. seems a better fit in a controllerless interface than doing the same with a 2D image.

If Natal is able to detect the grapple movement by the hand I agree, else I think the Wiimote or the PS wand are equally fit for 3D immersion when playing say tennis or table tennis with a 3D capable screen. I expect we will see some pretty cool 3D games using motion controls in the future.

I don´t hink MS yet has made any formal announcement about specific 3D support, I think they don´t want to mess up the first Natal games with to many features as well as they probably want to keep the message to the consumers as simple as possible. They don´t want people to believ they need a new TV to use Natal.

Besides that there may be limits to what kind of 3D displays that the first 360s with only component output can support.

 

[Crossbar]

More meat to the rumours that MS has dropped the internal CPU from Natal from gamesindustry.biz .

Still only rumours but of the fairly believable kind in my opinion.

 

[thop]

More meat to the rumours that MS has dropped the internal CPU from Natal from gamesindustry.biz

A few quotes by a certain Richard Leadbetter in there And all but confirms that this just a test balloon in regards to motion control for the actual successor of the current console.

 

[Rangers]

More meat to the rumours that MS has dropped the internal CPU from Natal from gamesindustry.biz .

Still only rumours but of the fairly believable kind in my opinion.

Sounds good to me. The less cost involved with Natal the better. And the Xcpu should certainly have the juice to handle it. Seems it may have lag reducing benefits as well.

 

[Crossbar]

Sounds good to me. The less cost involved with Natal the better. And the Xcpu should certainly have the juice to handle it. Seems it may have lag reducing benefits as well.

I agree. The only drawback I see is that it may reduce the possible resolution of the images due to to the bandwidth limit of the USB-port. Processing the image on Xenon (face detection and such) means that less compression can be used on the images transfered from the camera. I guess the Z-information will also require some bandwidth, but probably significantly less.

I believe that the USB limit was one reason why the PSEye couldn´t provide more than 480p at 60hz and 240p at 120 Hz.

 

[Nesh]

What could the drop of the CPU in Natal mean in terms of depth detection, face/voice recognition, player identification, input lag etc?

The inclusion of a CPU in Natal made me believe that performance hit would be minimal if lets say the developer wanted to include a lot of Natal's capabilities in a game that aims high visually and in physics.

Thats one of the reasons why I thought the PSEye+wand would not offer lots of its capabilities simultaneously

 

[obonicus]

And maybe we'll see finger-tracking afterall.

 

[LightHeaven]

More meat to the rumours that MS has dropped the internal CPU from Natal from gamesindustry.biz .

Still only rumours but of the fairly believable kind in my opinion.

This article seems purely based on speculation, thought... The only concrete "proof" they show is a PR line, claming that was in the CES press kit, but was in the E3 09 press kit aswell:

"Custom processor (running Microsoft proprietary software layer). A proprietary software layer makes the magic of “Project Natal” possible. This layer differentiates “Project Natal” from any other technology on the market through its ability to enable human body recognition and extract other visual noise."

(From E3 09 press kit)

And maybe we'll see finger-tracking afterall.

I may be seeing too much, but on that behind the scenes video where they showed natal sees, theres definatelly some finger tracking going on... The first guy shown fisrt raises his left hand, but his fingers aren't tracked very accuratelly, but afterwards he raises his right hand, and them, natal seemed to pick all fingers correctly...

Overall, that whole section just looked a lot more precise and responsive than the painting demo they showed on E3.

 

[obonicus]

They also showed pics like these:

of the skeleton they track.

Grandmaster, you had this demo'd to you -- is this the same screen you saw on the laptop?

Related:
http://www.vg247.com/2010/01/07/natal-consumes-10-15-of-360-cpu-power/#more-72892

Natal’s lead developer Alex Kipman told New Scientist at CES this week:
“Natal has to work on the existing hardware without taking too much hardware processing away from the games developers,” noting that Natal consumes between 10 to 15 percent of the Xbox’s computing power.

Still not confirmation of much.

 

[thop]

A player standing anywhere between 0.8 and 4 metres from Natal is illuminated with infrared light. A monochrome video camera records how much of that light they reflect, using the brightness of the signal to approximate their distance from the device and capture their movements in 3D.

...

He says Natal consumes just 10 to 15 per cent of the Xbox's computing resources and it can recognise any pose in just 10 milliseconds. It needs only 160 milliseconds to latch on to the body shape of a new user stepping in front of it.

http://www.newscientist.com/article...fts-bodysensing-buttonbusting-controller.html

 

[LightHeaven]

http://www.develop-online.net/news/33603/Lead-developer-exposes-Natal-inner-workings

It now seems official: Natal uses 10-15% of 360's cpu resources.

Natal has a 10ms lag detecting a pose, takes 200 ms to recognize a new person throwned in the front of the camera, and can now only track 31 body points, instead of the previously announced 48 (wonder if it means no finger tracking afterwall)

For creating the software they've collected terabytes of data that helps determining the pose the user is making, and the final software solution heights only 50mb.