Old Discussion Thread for all 3 motion controllers

[LightHeaven]

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

They also give some information about precision... It seems natal precision is 4 cubed centimeters from withinh this range... It seems enough precision to see fingers if accurate.

Edit: Or is it a cube with 4 cm sides? Seems more inline with the voxel presentation the video showed yesterday.

 

[LightHeaven]

The article I linked is the original source which Develop seems to have just summarised.

Yeah, the page was opened in a tab and wasn't refreshed so i didn't see your post, sorry

 

[Butta]

Wow after reading through this and watching the video... Natal looks like garbage.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/chipless-natal-why-cost-cutting-makes-sense-article
Sony MC will also be garbage if there is no thumbstick on the controller

 

[patsu]

Come on, let's see the end products before we judge.

I think all 3 (may be more) natural interfaces have a shot at establishing something unique and fun.

 

[dobwal]

The only thing I like about Natal is that its use seems to have the ability to intergrate seamlessly when you use a standard controller.

I don't think much of motion control when its comes to being the primary way of interacting with a video game. But as a way of extending the available options to a player and overcoming the limited number of buttons and limited use of the analog sticks, I find a great ideal. I like motion control from a perspective of adding extra layers of interaction and not from a perspective as a substitute (that markets as being more immersive or more fun) for the current way of interaction.

A scenario where a FPS had a Natal mechanic for recovering ammo or other items off dead AI or players actually requiring you looking through their pockets for intel, grabbing grenades or flashbangs off their person or actually picking up secondary weapons would intrigue me. Waving my arm just to initiate an animation or mechanic that Im used to doing with a press of a button is rather meh to me.

From that point of view, I don't think Natal needs to ber very sensitive in terms of picking up someone blinking an eye but MS and pubs need to make a concerted effort to make sure that gameplay in current genres are actually expanded upon and not just an expansion of new genres and casual games.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I think Natal's strength will be in unconventional implementations where the idea is to gain immersion by 'hiding' the interface from the user. I'm thinking something like Heavy Rain could be engineered to work by natural motions, and have the player experience it with instinctive movements. eg. To fight, the player woudl natural take a swing at their assailant, which would be interpreted as the attack option. The choice of fast and slow motions should come without thinking, in contrast to deft thumb control on a traditional stick.

I'm sure it'd take a lot of prototyping to get an ideal system, and perhaps we won't really get anything of that ilk before the next round of hardware, but Natal should start it this gen I hope, and get the ball rolling for some futuristic experiences.

 

[zed]

Sony MC will also be garbage if there is no thumbstick on the controller

yes they need to have some sort of standard input method

If I was sony Ild spend ~$50million on a tennis game, $5 million developing it + $45million marketting it (federer $20million should be enuf)

 

[grandmaster]

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

Yes this is very similar to the screen I saw but we were not allowed to take video of it, or of the work in progress sensor. It wasn't running on a laptop either!

What was cool about it was that it would calibrate new skeletons as they came into view, or indeed ignore them. What was even better about it was that you could walk closer to the sensor and if parts of the skeleton disappeared from view, it would extrapolate where they were with eerie precision.

So thinking of a thigh bone as being from point A to point B, if point B disappeared off the bottom of the sensor, the connecting dots would still be accurately plotted.

As I said today, I think Natal is awesome, but whether the concept works or not is all going to be down to imaginative use of the controls by developers. If it results in all-new games and ways to play them, that'll be a massive win.

About the gi.biz story by the way. It's not speculation. It's based on conversation with an independent and very respected developer. The chipless Natal story has been floating about for a while now but wasn't run until we had a solid source: gi.biz got there first.

 

[patsu]

I think Natal's strength will be in unconventional implementations where the idea is to gain immersion by 'hiding' the interface from the user. I'm thinking something like Heavy Rain could be engineered to work by natural motions, and have the player experience it with instinctive movements. eg. To fight, the player woudl natural take a swing at their assailant, which would be interpreted as the attack option. The choice of fast and slow motions should come without thinking, in contrast to deft thumb control on a traditional stick.

I'm sure it'd take a lot of prototyping to get an ideal system, and perhaps we won't really get anything of that ilk before the next round of hardware, but Natal should start it this gen I hope, and get the ball rolling for some futuristic experiences.

I was thinking about Heavy Rain too, but I think it may be awkward because HR has a lot of verbs (e.g., lie, persist, or leave in the grocery store opening scene). The users will be overwhelmed by the gesture variety. If it's picking from a menu, a button press works better. Gesturing may be too much work for too little value. If HR has a series of quick decisions to make, it will get tiring quickly.

I think the ultimate control mechanism for games like HR and Flowers is something like this. Too bad I may never live to see it.

Being able to undress Madison in the strip scene via mere thoughts, and will her moves while fighting the murderer is very powerful (albeit controversial). Voice input may work too, but it's disruptive and very laborious (Your mouth will dry up after a long game). Thought is still the best because the silence/rapport is what intrigue the player.

Watching the hills roll by as I focus on different parts of the screen in Flower is nice too. In this case, Sony may be able to fake it using head tracking (or the 3D eyeglasses). I will totally rebuy Flower if they have a 3D version.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I was thinking about Heavy Rain too, but I think it may be awkward because HR has a lot of verbs ...

Why I shifted my thinking from 'Heavy Rain' to 'like Heavy Rain'. That is, something that is more akin to HR, only fine-tuned for Natal, rather than games akin to what we're used to. It's that sort of a paradigm shift I think Natal needs, and encourages.

 

[patsu]

I see what you mean.

Compared to Gem, I think Natal's value prop is clearer. The killer app may be the controller-free DVD and media playback. That's it. Clean, simple and understood by everyone. The "universal" gameplay enhancement portion will/can take time to grow.

 

[scently]

Is it 10% of a core or of the whole cpu?

 

[AzBat]

Is it 10% of a core or of the whole cpu?

I read it as 10% of the whole system, not of any particular core or CPU or GPU. The exact wording was " Xbox's computing resources". Also remember the figure is the low-end. It was 10 to 15 percent.

Tommy McClain

 

[patsu]

I think it's just a very rough number (depends on what you do with it). Should also include bandwidth and/or memory usage since they said 'computing resources'.

 

[patsu]

Popular Science article on Natal:
http://www.popsci.com/gadgets/article/2010-01/exclusive-inside-microsofts-project-natal

Deep in Microsoft's lairs, the Xbox 360 team is working on more than just a new video-game system. They're actually trying to solve an incredibly difficult problem in artificial intelligence. Their prototype Project Natal lets you control a game just with your body movements—no buttons or Wii-like wands—by watching you with a 3-D video camera. Sounds simple enough, but most cameras just snap images without having any idea what they're looking at. To make Natal work, Microsoft has to teach its camera to understand what it sees.

EDIT: This GAF rumor is interesting:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=19197285&postcount=105

I'm a computer hardware engineer and actually design hardware to test image quality and performance characterization of CMOS image sensors. PCB layout and FPGA design/programming.

It's my understanding, having discussed Natal with a few engineers including some Stanford researchers, that Natal's big design "thing" was a proprietary processing chip that would do the heavy lifting of interpreting structured IR light arrays. I'll briefly explain.

...

I think the top talents referred to in the post did the "old" IR pinging approach. MS replaced it with their own point cloud processing system. So it should not affect the development momentum.

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Popular Science article on Natal:
http://www.popsci.com/gadgets/article/2010-01/exclusive-inside-microsofts-project-natal

Interesting, the bit about how they are going about creating the "brain" of Natal is fascinating as well as the computing resources they are throwing it at.

Hopefully MS releases a whitepaper on that aspect after they launch Natal. The whole approach to creating an AI that can independently learn and then once implemented be able to interpret and extrapolate movements and persistence of body parts is absolutely fascinating.

IE - going back to what grandmaster said above, how the system after having millions of images presented to it can now work out that an object isn't gone and to extrapolate where it probably is. Similar to a baby eventually learning what a "hand" is, and then further along learning that it doesn't disappear when hidden by an object, and then futher along the learning process can "guess" where that hand is, even when it isn't in view.

Oh the other hand, I'm a bit disappointed if they are indeed dropping the custom processor. That will limit the scope of applications, IMO.

Regards,
SB

 

[AzBat]

Totilo has more details...

those reports gave way to comments we received from a source familiar with the development of Project Natal who said that the peripheral would actually need to use up to 33 percent, a third, of the 360's CPU.
...
For today, they focused on shooting down the source's 33 percent figure: "The software behind 'Project Natal' is what makes it special. While we aren't able to share further details at this point, we can assure you that 'Project Natal' does not require a dedicated Xbox 360 CPU core."

CES' Burning Xbox Question: Will Natal Not Work With High-End Games?
http://kotaku.com/5443233/

Got me slightly concerned if the claims are true.

Tommy McClain

 

[Brad Grenz]

I suspected the 10% figure was lowballed. I think your processor requirements will largely scale depending on how much of what data you need from the cameras for your game. If you need a full skeleton PLUS background replacement and other image manipulation you will be sacrificing a lot of CPU time. I'm not surprised MS decided NATAL couldn't be a $100+ device, but going software will have significant detrimental effects.

 

[obonicus]

Detrimental to whom, though? To us? Or to the people Microsoft is targeting with this? It'll still look way better than Wii games, even if it uses vastly more resources than reported.

As to the software solution actually working, that always seemed like the easiest part. Computer vision is a difficult problem, but there's plenty of algorithms that run reasonably. Making it run fast and in real-time is far more interesting (which MS seems to have done).

 

[Crossbar]

The system locates body parts to within a 4-centimetre cube, says Kipman.

I guess that rules out Natal detecting separate finger movements, (Kotaku).

Still it´s better than Sonys 3D camera, link.

ICU's stereo cameras can detect the position of specific points on the arms, legs and head to within 10 cubic centimetres