Youtube videos can be found here.
It looks amazing.
Will they fail in the same manner as Wii? (If you think that Wii failed)
Some of the games in the video look great (fighting, driving (not the pit stop part), rampage, skateboarding, etc) The xbox live stuff is pretty amazing (video conf)
The scanning of the kid’s skateboard was cool too.
What do you think? What’s gonna hold it back? Besides the fact that not everyone has a living room like that 
What will hold it back is the fact that Microsoft didn’t even give a whiff of when Project Natal will be ready. That leads me to believe it’s not quite ready for primetime.
I also have a sinking feeling it will be ridiculously expensive.
I have a feeling it will become an expensive gimmick, if it does launch. And I strongly think it is going to fail miserably: even the best motion-capture camera is not going to differentiate between the player and somebody walking behind them or the cat sniffing around in front of the TV. I have visions of (the older but not much wiser) Angry Video Game Nerd, 20 years from now, making a video about how bad it is. It’s going to be this generation’s Roll and Rocker or…uh, whatever it was that you shouted “Fire! Fire! Fire! Fire!” into to shoot. It’s a pathetic attempt to catch up to the Wii, and I say this as someone who’s being accused of “Wii-hate” in the past.
Fuck the future; I didn’t get an Xbox to be active.
Engadget is trying to get a demo unit. It won’t be available to consumers in 2009.
It won’t be expensive. The hardware is cheap. All the work is in the software. Microsoft would sell this at a loss if they had to, in order to build the Xbox market.
Microsoft has HUGE plans for Xbox, and some of their new services are pretty amazing. Zune Video finally looks like something I’d want to use - 1080p streaming movies with no wait times before the movie starts is damned cool. Natal looks great if it works as advertised. Even just its ability to be used as a media center remote with hand gestures is cool enough to make it desirable. Facial recognition is really neat - walk into the living room, and the TV pops up your favorite playlists, contacts, waiting messages, whatever. No waiting to boot up, log in, navigate through menus to your own stuff.
And that’s all before we even get to the gameplay aspect. I think that’s probably the iffiest part of the project. Not everyone moves the same. Some people have disabilities which inhibit full motion. It remains to be seen if everyone wants to have a workout every time they play a game. But for those who do, and who can handle the precision movements required, it could be great.
Microsoft is in the process of pulling a whole lot of technologies together which they hope will give them the ability to go after Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch, the Mac, the Ps3, the Wii, and other platforms. And they may just pull it off. To date, Zune has been a joke. But the new version of it is pretty compelling, especially when you have many zune-capable devices. For example, the new Zune portable player will stream HD content, and will talk to your Xbox and PC. Windows Home Server and Windows 7 have the ability to aggregate media, make it available to any device, provide access to your files over the internet, do automated backups of everything, and more. All your microsoft devices are recognized as media extenders, so if you connect up a TV tuner to your PC, you can watch TV on your handheld Zune player over Wi-fi or even streamed over the internet to a remote location.
Now we just have to see if they can deliver on the promises. So far, everything I’ve seen in this latest generation of Microsoft stuff has been great. Windows 7 is awesome. Windows Home Server simply works, and works well. I’ll definitely give the new Zune media stuff a try, and project Natal, if it ever ships.
No comments on the Playstation Motion Controller that was debuted yesterday as well? Not sure how much the final product will be as the demo, but that video looks awfully 1:1.
I don’t see how it could work for games without some type of external controller. In the Rampage clip, they show the kid moving toward the console to make the monster on the game move forward. What happens when you can’t move any closer to the unit? I’ll admit that the fighting looked cool, but scanning the skateboard was a bit weird. Did it scan and digitally render the piece of his hand that was holding the skateboard too?
I can’t wrap my head around how it could work the way it’s shown, but I hope they do.
Natal isn’t just a motion capture camera. It uses a sonar-like ranging system using infra-red beams as well as the camera image to build 3D maps of what’s going on, so it can definitely tell you from the person standing behind you. The company that makes the core technology, 3DV systems, says that their camera + chipset can resolve any item with a resolution of a few millimeters within the 3D space of your living room, and it can do it at 60 fps without using the CPU. That’s pretty impressive.
Another very cool thing about the camera system is that you can make a whole host of cheap peripherals to improve the gaming experience. For example, for a golfing game you could buy a plastic golf club with a little reflective ball on the end to make it easy to track. Then the game could actually use the real position of the club head to determine your swing, rather than just using your body motions. The same goes for fencing games. A glove with a bunch of reflective dots on it would allow the camera to detect where your fingers are, how your hand is rotating, etc. A bowling game might be very accurate this way.
Microsoft has been demoing this technology for several years, just not for gaming.
Yeah, maybe, Sam. But as someone who’s waiting on their XBox to come back after Red Ring of Death #2 in less than a month–well, let’s just say that Project Natal is nothing if the hardware isn’t there. There’s that little voice inside of me that says “If they can’t even figure out exactly what’s causing RRoD and they’ve spent $1 billion fixing that problem…” I’d rather like to have an XBox that works than one that has infrared motion capture and 3D mapping to the millimeter and 35% of the time it goes BZZZZZT and you spend months sending it to Mesquite, TX, thank you.
What exactly is 1:1 ? I mean, isn’t the Wii out of the box 1:1 ?
Then again, Wii Motion Plus should make it further 1:1 right?
I didn’t see Natal in action. Are we really going to pay that much more money, to just not carry a wiimote?
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I love how the PS3 offering didn’t even have a name. And again, didn’t Nintendo have this 3 years ago?
I just loved the bow and arrow demo, for the PS3. I Was like “We have a Wiimote now!”
-This coming from the company that decided force feedback was a fad. From a company that had to update the controller to add in motion sensor.
Game journalists have pretty much unanimously decided to call it the Wand until Sony says otherwise.
This seems great for people with huge living rooms but what about people who live in shoe size apartments with no space anywhere? How are they supposed to play?
Everyone wants to be Nintendo and I see both of them reflecting their companies. Sony’s appears to be an over engineered direct copy that’s going to cost far more than it should for an experiment. Microsoft has a more clever design that looks like it will fail in interesting ways.
For both of them I suspect that these are attempts to test the waters. The number of alternative interfaces introduced after launch and have been successful can be counted on one hand. Microsoft made a stab at their perception of the Wii audience last year and failed badly so I don’t think they’re going the same way again. It makes more sense to me that they’re testing their interfaces on their known platform before deciding to pursue these alternative interfaces more fiercely.
Either way I like Microsoft’s design. It’s clever, timely, and could even be integrated in a console if it comes down to it. I’ve got some concerns about performance since the eye toy had some real problems though Microsoft seems to have a novel solution to the lighting and contrast issues. I hope they can refine it now and build on it in the future. Sony? Sixaxis was a bad idea. Copying Nintendo directly not only makes them look creatively bankrupt but the solution is not to do them better and charge twice as much.
I bought and played the Eye Toy for PS2 back in 2005 and while the technology isn’t near as advanced as Natal, the principle was the same… Eye Toy games were fun to play but they could never work it into games other than those made specifically for Eye Toy. No sports games, no shooters, no driving games… Even with 1:1 motion capture, you just can’t be as precise waving your hands in the air as you can with a physical controller. Plus, waving your arms around to navigate menus got old, quick. Gamers by default are a lazy bunch – we’d rather just click a button.
Again, maybe the new tech will make it easier and more effective to integrate into real games, and with it coming directly from Microsoft instead of a 3rd party developer they might get publishers to throw in support for it… but I have a feeling it’s going to be a very popular ooh-ahh gimmick for a while then gamers will go back to their trusty controllers.
Just saw the video and was very impressed. I keep reading about all the great R&D that Microsoft does and certainly the company has been producing some great demos recently. In fact when it comes to new user interfaces Microsoft is probably the leader: Microsoft Surface which they demoed last year (?), the touch features in Windows 7 and now this. Whether these demos will translate into actual products that work as advertised we will have to see. What’s happened to Surface?
What about the Peter Molyneaux [demo](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWnZOseA3Lw&feature=related) some of which is utterly amazing. For example when the girl interacts with the water. A few questions: how is Milo's voice being generated? It sounds a lot better than any computer-generated voice I have heard; is it a recording by a voice-actor? And does Milo really understand what the girl is saying or is it a scripted conversation? My understanding was that the natural language abilities of computers are still limited; have things really progressed to the point where AI characters can carry out regular conversations with humans?This is similar to the problems with some games on the Wii. The developers seem to think that just because they’re making a Wii game, there have to be motion-control elements. For shooting and driving games this can work fine, but for others, not so much.
The basic issue is that console games up until now have been made to run on normal controllers. It makes it hard to envision how a Natal game will work; there’s never been an interface like that, so nobody’s ever worked through the issues with making a game for it. There’s thirty years of gameplay evolution based on the control abilities of a gamepad.
Take Zelda. Every Zelda game has been (basically) run with the d-pad/stick, sword with one button, item with another button. Then they made a Wii game, so they map the aiming to the remote and the sword to the waggle. And the DS came out, so they mapped running and item placement to the touch-screen. If I try to think of a Natal or Motion+ version of Zelda, it’s basically running with a controller, and motion-sensing swordfighting.
But maybe that’s just my prejudice from playing all these years. If you could transport 1980’s Miyamoto into a room with a Natal dev kit in 2010, maybe he comes up with a Zelda that’s just completely different from what we know.
It looked to me like Milo was mostly running pre-scripted conversation snippets (“Hey, wanna go fishing?”), interspersed with a few ELIZA-like rephrases of what the human says.
Looks like a bunch of demos that be about as fun as Virtual Boy.
will ultimately
So, so seconded.
Also, I really thought my rock band drumkit was the epitome of “looking like a complete moron in front of the telly”. I was wrooOOOooong…