Project Natal: MS Full Body 3D Motion Detection
- Thread starter Arwin
- Start date
It'd be nice if you could point to the player you want to select (even better look at them and have the camera follow your gaze!) as that's a chief beef with FIFA. The other major complaint I have is laggy controls, without players often taking a good while to respond to intentions. eg. To pass a long ball you need to hold the button down, but if you want to pass a long ball now instead of in 300 ms time, well...tough!
Natal could certainly do clever things like read facial expressions and adjust difficulty so the player always looks happy, perhaps. And reading player's frustrated faces when the ref calls an impossible offside and changing the decision would be nice too
Natal could certainly do clever things like read facial expressions and adjust difficulty so the player always looks happy, perhaps. And reading player's frustrated faces when the ref calls an impossible offside and changing the decision would be nice too
Silent_Buddha
Legend
That immediately made me think of spray painting in an urban environment. Something all 3 systems would be interesting to do with. In the case of Natal, you could even mimic holding a spray can.
Although for some of the more artistically challenged among us (me) the results would certainly be too embarrassing to show to friends.
Or imagine a simple "finger painting" game for the kiddies. Maybe get them to stop painting on my walls.
Regards,
SB
I agree for the most part, but as others have stated, it depends on the level of precision they can attain. According to the zcam article on wikipedia, the system has a precision of 1-2 cm at 2.5 meters away from the camera. For head tracking to work, you could at most turn your head left or right 5-6 cm and this would require sub-centimeter precision to get any real gaming value.
I think commercial value for the hardcore is very limited.
The real value will be the all variety of new exercise games.
Wii fit and EA active are both selling extremely well. Natal is the next giant step in evolution of exercise games. Natal can keep track of your aerobic worksouts, it can keep track of your yoga poses, and much more. This IMO will be the killer app for NATAL.
more applications: dance tutor/game < -- this could be huge. an app can capture your dance movements and superimpose them on a real dancer and you can see when and why your moves are not in sync. It could give real time instruction on your movments.
Casual motion capture for short animated movies. Kids could splice their own movies with their avatars and make short stories.
the possibilities are endless...
This is what will catapult XBox Natal to stardom. It will blow away the wii.
Last edited by a moderator:
The RGB camera is used for facial recognition and most likely the type of head tracking people are talking about.
Even then, I would imagine the precision to be at most .5 cms. For head tracking to work, when a person turn his head to the right or left 2 inches, you would need to cover like 90 degrees for the in game character's viewpoint.
2inches ~ 5 cms. so that is like 10 points would need to be spread out over 90 degress. I suppose there is some value in HC gaming for that. But it certainly isn't ideal.
I don't think head rotation is suitable control. It's unnatural. IMO it'd be better to track movements left/right and up/down. eg. When a car is driving towards a hill, often a game will crane their head up. Or they'll lean slightly left to get a better view around a right-hand corner. I know some look up, rotating their head up, to see upwards in first-person games, which could be tracked readily with chin position on the Y axis, but I don't know anyone who rotates the head left/right while playing. Even if they do though, the camera adjustments can't really work because the players would correct their view as where they're looking moves. That is, in an FPS if they see a Baddie on the right of the screen and rotate their head, the camera would move to look at the Baddie making him move towards the centre of the screen, creating a moving target where the Baddie is otherwise stationary. In essence it'd be like controlling a car with head movements, which'd be odd.
For resolution though, we've seen in the Toshiba virtual makeup demo that accurate tracking can be obtained with a standard optical camera. Obviously with the player sat further from the camera it'll lose resolution to work with, but enough accuracy could be got for some useful application I think.
For resolution though, we've seen in the Toshiba virtual makeup demo that accurate tracking can be obtained with a standard optical camera. Obviously with the player sat further from the camera it'll lose resolution to work with, but enough accuracy could be got for some useful application I think.
Hasn't someone demoed head tracking using Eye Toy? How did it work?
If there is enough precision to do head tracking by rotation of the head and tilt, I still think that would be the most natural way of doing it. You'd obviously need a lot of sensitivity to be able to do a broad range of movement in game without having to turn your head away from the screen.
If there is enough precision to do head tracking by rotation of the head and tilt, I still think that would be the most natural way of doing it. You'd obviously need a lot of sensitivity to be able to do a broad range of movement in game without having to turn your head away from the screen.
It would depend on the resolution of the camera and the distance from the camera, no? The RGB camera is going to be much higher resolution than the time of flight camera. I haven't seen anything about specs yet. I'm guessing it will be at least as good as the live vision camera (640x480 30fps), or better. It's a three year old camera, so I imagine they can do much better now for a low price.
Indeed.
And for the types of projects they are looking to do, a hi res cam would be useful and expected.
Thanks, yeah I forgot about the voice interface. I wonder how far they could take it? Could we expect to see a Windows Xbox Natal version?
Silent_Buddha
Legend
Well, considering when asked, MS representatives told some of the people that Natal was demo'd to that the voice recognition is basically the same as what will be shipping with Windows 7.
Take that however you want.
Regards,
SB
Yeah I had heard about that, but it really depends on how far they want to take it. I've tried the voice recognition in Vista 64 and I swear that it was better than Dragon almost as soon as I started using it. For simple commands it would be a really cool gimmick as most people have never used a voice interface before so it would encourage them to show it off to their friends. Perhaps the voice elements are the killer application rather than the video, or at the very least as much a killer app. What do you think?
If it follows B&W, the voice recognition could be extremely immersive, picking up the gentle instructions that the player naturally utters towards the virtual creature.Black & White 3 ?
"Right, pet. Just get those villagers some food will y...arrrggghhh! don't EAT them you dumb muppet! Come here! Come here! I'm gonna spank some sense into you!"
Hmmmmm, doesn't bode well
That guy was an idiot though. He kept talking to himself and trying to using commands that don't exist.
He's also trying to write a freaking perl script using voice commands. It's clearly meant as humor.
