Xbox 360: Project Natal

[trufun202]

Hooooooly shiiiiit! Microsoft announced what is essentially their answer to the Wii. And all I can say is...Wow.

If this works as well as they show, this is going to be amazing. imo, there's still no replacing good ol' button mashing, but I'm impressed.

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/live/projectnatal/

[gordon]

As much as I dislike Microsoft, that is pretty impressive. The question is will it be as impressive as they've made it look or will it be a flop?

[teamtwentythree]

Yea, it looks pretty crazy. I'm pretty doubtful it'll actually work as well as it did in the video. If it does they better port the tech to Win7, Minority Report here we come.

[programmerinprogress]

I think it looks great, but i'm not so convinced about how well it will work.

The paint package looks pretty sweet, and I liked the ball game, but my overriding distrust of peter molyneux made me doubt milo, i'm not so sure that piece of kit's going to work as intended.

This is how I envision a conversation with Milo if the voice recognition technology hasn't moved on from what i've already experienced of voice recognition software.

ME: Hi Milo
Milo: hey Mike!
ME: whatsup?
Milo: sorry, can you say that again?
ME: whatsup?
Milo: sorry, can you say that again?
ME: whatsup?
Milo: sorry, can you say that again?
ME: ANSWER MY QUESTION OR SO HELP ME!
Milo: sorry, can you say that again?
*wishes there WAS a controller so I could throw it at milo's head!*

you do see what i'm getting at here, right?

Verdict: the peripheral sounds great, my faith in there being decent software to accompany the peripheral... well i'm not holding my breath.

your thoughts?

[dandymcgee]

Yeah.. I highly doubt this will be even remotely close to what it shown as a "vision" in the video, but I'm interested in how they're going to go about attempting it.

Also, the idea of no controller just annoys me. I LIKE having buttons I can press and rely on, kinda like how the select button in guitar hero always works a hundred times better than lifting the neck to activate star power.

[LeonBlade]

Okay... now by NO means do I know how they are doing the full body recognition, but I have a pretty good idea...

They claim to use "state of the art" face recognition to detect your face and tell when your in front of the camera and sign you in to your Xbox.
It's not really that new technology at all but whatever doesn't matter really.

So once they got your face in the camera's sights they obviously know where your head is on screen.
Then the camera picks up on your neck and body down and limbs based on... well where they're supposed to be lol.

Basically all I know is they use face recognition.
They also will be using voice recognition... when I saw that all I could think of was that voice recognition from Windows Vista lol.

So far the uses of this don't seem like they can be "hardcore" gaming related besides maybe a boxing game or something?
The paint thing looks pretty cool, but what ever happened to the 360 fans saying how hardcore it was lol.
Now you got avatars and painting... BUT THIS ISN'T FOR PICKING ON THE 360... so let's get off that topic.

Here is my favorite part of the demo is this picture...
"Ever wanted to see what the bottom of an avatar's shoe looks like?"
*lifts up leg*


Uhh... yeah...
They have some bugs obviously I just thought that was funny lol.

I don't think it's going to get very far.
Sony is using tracking on controllers that can track the controller using the PlayStation Eye in 3D space sorta like what Natal does, but not your entire body.
They showed a demo of what you can do with it, and I found it much more exciting than Natal...