Old Discussion Thread for all 3 motion controllers

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Whether it's 10% or 30% really isn't the issue. The bottom line is that the crux of whether Natal will work will be in the *concept* of the games that are made for it. With Wii and PS Wand you can graft the motion controls into existing game concepts. You can't with Natal. MS tried to prove you could with the Burnout demo but in my experience of using it, it just wasn't satisfactory to play. Forget the lag of the input method, the "lag" of moving your arms and legs was far more impactful!

With regards the detection and skeleton processing, this works. Maybe it was running on PC when I saw it, but regardless, it works.
 
_phil_ said:
Completly unrelated technologies and target demographics.It's not even connected in any way with sony consoles division...
Click to expand...

"Completly unrelated technologies" really?

And with regard to "target demographic" they give an explaination that the technolgy is yet to unproven to target the consumer market. That can obviously change.

Do you honestly believe Dr Richard Marks hasn´t looked at that camera? Isn´t it like 5 years ago that Sony demoed IR 3D cameras a la Natal at GDC?
 
Kotaku said:
The source explained to Kotaku that, while Natal wouldn't use the horsepower of a full core of Microsoft's three-core central processor, it would need to use a core on its own in order to reduce latency between human input and what happens on a TV screen. That would leave the CPU's other two cores for the other processes needed to run Natal-compatible Xbox 360 games.
Click to expand...
Whether this is true or not the guy doesn't understand what he is talking about...
Fot the sentence to make sense it should be:
while Natal wouldn't use the horsepower of a full core of Microsoft's three-core central processor, it would need to use a THREAD on its own in order to reduce latency between human input and what happens on a TV screen.
Click to expand...
Which come in line with the 10/15% figures found on other links.
In regard to High end game, well art and gameplay wins :LOL:
Other than that with the custom proc supposedly, Natal takes it share on the system that pretty clear, most likely one thread is locked away for devs, as well as 50MB of RAM.

But basically I would qualify a lot of talk about Natal now (on the web) as FUD...
 
patsu said:
Popular Science article on Natal:
http://www.popsci.com/gadgets/article/2010-01/exclusive-inside-microsofts-project-natal

...That saves programmers the near-impossible task of coding rules that describe all the zillions of possible movements a body can make.
Click to expand...
Strikes me as an odd solution. We already have clear rules on what human movements are possible because of anatomical limits. If they have a fulled rigged skeleton, surely it's just a matter of mapping the joints to the locations found in the IR image? And because humans move at a relatively limited speed, you can expect any extreme changes from the previous image to be wrong. Yet from the sounds of it, and looking at the image, the points being tracked aren't actually attached to a skeleton system, and the skeleton is built up between them, or something. Rather than starting with a skeleton and mapping its joints to the point locations.

I can understand the need for the advanced image recognition when a new player arrives and you want to map the skeleton to limbs without them standing like a star, but I don't get the need for the complex processing afterwards.

Edit : Also the Kotaku article mentions a "50 MB software" solution. Is that reference data that needs to reside in RAM? If so, that's a 10% resource consumption tying in with the disclosed system requirements figure 10-15%.
 
Crossbar said:
I guess that rules out Natal detecting separate finger movements, (Kotaku).

Still it´s better than Sonys 3D camera, link.
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Marginally. And at what cost? Natal is accurate to within ~+/- 8mm in three dimensions, and the optical solution is accurate to ~ +/- 11mm. 6mm less error is enough to make finger tracking slightly more plausible on Natal, but the 16mm's noise is still quite a hurdle - you finger could be juddering about it's own width between frames, based solely on depth samples. Neither is particularly great in the fidelity terms. In contrast, Gem is supposed to be sub-millimetre accurate, which goes to show anything requiring fine control is still going to need a hardware solution at the moment (this reference to Gem is only made to clarify the difference between accurate and approximate positioning, and in no way is an attempt to appease the mighty Lord Stringer with Sony propagnada and keep him pumping money into the British economy. I've already hit my quoter for that this month...).

And regards cost, MS are requiring a new, (presumably) expensive, 3D time-of-flight camera whereas the optical solution just uses two ordinary cameras. Which is better for creating 3D images too, in our brave new 3D world of the Future. Natal has the huge benefit of not worrying about lighting conditions though, which is perhaps the most important feature in the home setting. But then again, I suppose an optical system could still use the IR band and illuminate the scene with human-invisible light.

I still regard Natal as a better design and the future, but your point about accuracy doesn't really raise Natal above optical solutions. The difference between 10 cubic centimetres and 4 cubic centimetres is the difference between Sheffield United and Barnsley - Sheffield may be better, but they're still playing in the same less-than-premiereship league.
 
You are right that the difference between 10 cubic centimetres and 4 cubic centimetres is pretty insignificant. My point was that even the uncertainty of 4 cubic cm would make it pretty hard to separate two fingers from each other and to detect small fingers as well as small movements of the fingers.

Using IR to illuminate the object to help the stereo camera may be a smart way to make it work in bad lightning conditions. As a user of the Playstation Eye I know lightning can be pretty important to help the image recognition sw.
 
Crossbar said:
I guess that rules out Natal detecting separate finger movements, (Kotaku).

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

But this 4 centimeter comes from 4cm³ or a cube with 4cm sides? If it is the former, the cube side is 1.6 cm, enought to get individual fingers for an avarage person, provided they are separeted enough. If the later that would mean 12cm³, actually less precise than sony's ICU.

But, i think finger tracking will be possible, but i'm guessing it will have to be from upclose, perhaps tracking the fingers and not much else... Wich I think it would be that way anyway in order to work... I can't see someone sing their finger to controle an interface from a distance even if it was possible...

Maybe developers can somewhat "calibrate" the room, asking the person to stay within a certain distance and checking if the person's fingers are trackable...
 
with this 4 cubic cm and 10 cubic cm... how they came up with that number? I mean how far the object (human) is from the camera to get that 4 and 10 numbers?

and if natal use 10 to 15% of processor power and the process can't be multi-theraded, then it would use 30-45% of a single core.... if that's correct (speculation of course), wouldn't that kind of processor utilization is significant?

What I'm afraid if developer pursue a game that is compatible on all three motion controllers. Which means no full body tracking, no latency sensitive games, and not using the orb thingie (basically can't use the unique feature of each motion controller solution). Of course first party games wouldn't have this problem, but I would imagine a company like EA would like to bring out games on 3 platform with similar control scheme.
 
LightHeaven said:
But this 4 centimeter comes from 4cm³..?
Click to expand...
Yes, this.
...enought to get individual fingers for an avarage person...
Click to expand...
It'll be a whole finger-width degree of error. You couldn't tell with accuracy if a finger was pointing straight, slightly up or slightly down. Also this figure isn't for object size tracking, but for accuracy of the joints being tracked (knee, elbow, wrist etc.). The actual point clouds are a higer resolution and will detect smaller objects than 4cm³ but the noise in their position will render them untrackable, I guess.
If the later that would mean 12cm³
Click to expand...
You mean 64cm³! ;)
 
LightHeaven said:
But this 4 centimeter comes from 4cm³ or a cube with 4cm sides? If it is the former, the cube side is 1.6 cm, enought to get individual fingers for an avarage person, provided they are separeted enough. If the later that would mean 12cm³, actually less precise than sony's ICU.
Click to expand...

Good catch, it actually says "4-centimetre cube", that could obviously mean a cube with a 4 centimeter side. But considering the usually poor journalism, I guess both the MS and Sony article could have missrepresented metrics, so maybe we should just leave the discussion until the final products are available.

With regard to finger tracking and gameplay, maybe it is sufficient if the system is capable of detecting a closed or open hand. Remember that kids will definitely be an important target demographics of Natal games.
 
It's also a matter of focus and software. Right now they've mostly seemed to work on full body tracking. But I assume similar technology could be created that focusses on the hands in particular. In that case, it's all a matter of relatve size and I could see how a zoomed in image of the hand could improve tracking precision considerably.

In any case, by bringing the software back to the CPU, they gain flexibility in programming and configuration. While I'm sure this could certainly take up 33% of a single core on the 360, I don't believe there that many games that are maxing out the CPUs on the 360. When you do want to add Natal support to existing games, you might as well do it properly and release a patch, in which case you can also optimise/reallocate some resources if necessary.

For now though I think it's all about new games anyway.
 
Shifty Geezer said:
Yes, this.
It'll be a whole finger-width degree of error. You couldn't tell with accuracy if a finger was pointing straight, slightly up or slightly down. Also this figure isn't for object size tracking, but for accuracy of the joints being tracked (knee, elbow, wrist etc.). The actual point clouds are a higer resolution and will detect smaller objects than 4cm³ but the noise in their position will render them untrackable, I guess.
Click to expand...
Oh i see, i was more concerned on weather or not natal could see the fingers or not, that did'nt come to think that maybe it could see but without the precision required to actually tell where the finger is pointing.

Shifty Geezer said:
You mean 64cm³! ;)
Click to expand...
Oops, my bad :p

I guess that means it really is 4cm³ then, 64 seems just too high
 
Arwin said:
It's also a matter of focus and software. Right now they've mostly seemed to work on full body tracking. But I assume similar technology could be created that focusses on the hands in particular. In that case, it's all a matter of relatve size and I could see how a zoomed in image of the hand could improve tracking precision considerably.

In any case, by bringing the software back to the CPU, they gain flexibility in programming and configuration. While I'm sure this could certainly take up 33% of a single core on the 360, I don't believe there that many games that are maxing out the CPUs on the 360. When you do want to add Natal support to existing games, you might as well do it properly and release a patch, in which case you can also optimise/reallocate some resources if necessary.

For now though I think it's all about new games anyway.
Click to expand...
You should also consider the memory overhead supposedly the software weights 50MB which is an healthy amount ;)
 
Crossbar said:
"Completly unrelated technologies" really?

And with regard to "target demographic" they give an explaination that the technolgy is yet to unproven to target the consumer market. That can obviously change.

Do you honestly believe Dr Richard Marks hasn´t looked at that camera? Isn´t it like 5 years ago that Sony demoed IR 3D cameras a la Natal at GDC?
Click to expand...

First , it's sony image-sensing division, far removed from the gaming division and R.Marks R&D department , and second, their stereo camera is just 2 normal camera 2d cameras, and software image analysis for triangulation.

(And yes ,i know about Richard Marks doing 3d camera demo 5 years ago,with BTW the prototype TOF camera designed by very same compagny MS bought recently.)
 
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_phil_ said:
First , it's sony image-sensing division, far removed from the gaming division and R.Marks R&D department , and second, their stereo camera is just 2 normal camera 2d cameras, and software image analysis for triangulation.

(And yes ,i know about Richard Marks doing 3d camera demo 5 years ago,with BTW the prototype TOF camera designed by very same compagny MS bought recently.)
Click to expand...

Well to me they don´t seem to be "completely unrelated technologies" as the article claims:

Like Natal, Sony's system tracks a person's whole body without their having to wear the body markers used in motion-capture studios. Also like Natal, Sony says ICU can detect a player's emotions by watching their facial expressions, and can judge sex and approximate age from their appearance.
Click to expand...

If you think Sony has completely water tight locks between its corporate research divisions I guess you have some specific reasons to believe so.

From my experience when working at multinational companies they have all encouraged taking advantage of corporate research within the field you are working in. I would be very surprised if Richard Marks and his gruop didn´t share his knowledge in image recognition (like face and emotion detection) with Sony Europe´s image sensing division and vice versa. Especially since a large part of the eyetoy software development has taken place in Europe if I remeber correctly.
 
Actually, considering what we know of Sony, unless the recent reorg has had a massive effect, I'd expect the opposite, for the image sensing division to adopt a clear NIH mentality.
 
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