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Jun 11 / Ozymandias

Natal on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon

Just wanted to share a more recent video demoing Natal. Last night Kudo went on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and demoed the Breakout and Burnout demos. Not sure whether I’ll be able to embed the Hulu video here, but you can go to the Joystiq article to see it as well.

Couple of things I’d point out of interest.

The first is that the technology works. Like all technologies there will always be areas to improve, but the simple fact that you can have different people jump in and out of the experience and instantly be able to play really illustrates the capabilities of the system. Keep an eye out for when Kudo says things like "it’s got you now" and "put your hands to your side". That’ll give you a sense of how quickly the system can adjust to a new body in view and begin skeletal tracking.

The second is that this is just the very tip of the iceberg with regards to motion controlled gaming. There’s a lot of confusion out there about what capabilties Natal has versus the Wii Motion Plus, or Sony’s new motion controller. Here’s the key point: Natal can interact with your real world; the other controllers are limited to what data they can collect from fixed, onboard hardware. Put another way, Natal is watching the environment and feeding the system a boatload of motion and 3D space data. How you use that data is completely unconstrained. A first layer Microsoft Research enabled was that of skeletal tracking, which gives plenty of major hooks for titles to build games upon. In the future I fully expect that titles and developers will continue to surprise us as they use the data in new and innovative ways.

Finally, I know there’s a decent amount of excitement and questions around the technology. I’ll just say here that if you have a question, I probably can’t answer it. ;) That’s just the way it is right now… we’ll be sharing a lot more on technology, pricing, experiences, timing, etc. in the future. So lots more to come!

Related posts:

  1. Attending Microsoft Gamefest (with Lots of Natal Love)
  2. Heavy Rain + Natal: The “Missed” Opportunity
  3. The Outlier Post: Microsoft Labs Photosynth Technology
  4. Image Metrics and the Uncanny Valley
  5. I’m Still Alive…

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  • http://www.beltonmo.net Porktree

    Natal is pretty exciting – the only thing that worries me is what kind of light level it requires, I’m more of an in the basement in the dark kind of gamer, and never had the lighting to use with the usb camera’s games.

  • jonnie boy

    Natal doesn’t care how much light is in the room. It works a different way.

  • http://ozymandias.com/ Ozymandias

    Yep – Natal uses an IR camera for depth sensing. IR isn’t light dependent, so it’ll work the same in a dark room. That said, should a game choose to *also* incorporate streaming video, you’ll have to take light into account. But for motion sensing it’s not an issue.

  • HappyHowie

    I have seen all the hype,

    but have also seen the glint in peoples eyes who have used it and that is better than ANY hype.

    I have been gaming since the ZX81 here is Scotland and I think this is going to be a big breakthrough – in gaming AND interface interaction.

    Looking forward to what the Microsoft and 3rd party guys can do with in in the next 12 to 18 months !

  • deftangel

    The thing that concerns me with the burnout demo is that I don’t see how that’s a good way to play that sort of game. I hope that was just a proof of concept and not an indication of where the software for this is heading. Natal needs to be used to do new things, not reverse engineer existing control mechanisms to suit it.

  • http://ozymandias.com/ Ozymandias

    Burnout is a proof of concept showing that the technology works. It was stated that no Burnout code was changed – that’s Burnout as originally shipped, with the camera basically mapping to the original input code in the game. I believe designers who are building a game with Natal in mind could certainly come up with more intuitive control options.

  • Joe

    I can’t wait until we hear more about Natal, because it really is the next step in interface design, not just for video games, but for PCs, televisions, and, well, who knows!

    A more video game-centric worry for me is if games like Halo 3 and CoD4 will be fully controllable via the Project Natal camera. One part of my would like to see it tried, but another part of me feels like it would just be a horrible idea.

  • Robert

    This is the first step of many to one day having your own "HOLO DECK" (AS in STAR TREK) I have told many that one day your room will hold the game and you will feel like you are there. Too bad I will be too old or dead! I wish I were born today!

  • El Cid

    The technology looks pretty neat. My only concern is that my 16 year old son uses a wheelchair and I hope this technology doesn’t exclude the disabled community (he obviously can’t do the running type motions but he finds the hand controls exciting).

  • http://ozymandias.com/ Ozymandias

    @El Cid – The technology certainly doesn’t do anything to exclude anyone. The trick will be for games to consider what motions handicapped gamers might make. My hope is that some of these games will be completely playable by everyone, even those challenged by some types of motions. Others probably won’t unfortunately.

  • http://citystate.co.uk/ Robin

    I question the level of demand for a controller-less interface, considering the last of our ancestors who weren’t genetically predisposed to using manual tools died out 2.6 million years ago. But seriously…

    It’s a shame that MS have decided to chase Wii Fit and EyeToy, developing a ‘secondary’ controller that will be safely ring-fenced away from traditional games for fear of upsetting the core audience.

    Motion tracking tech gives us a very real opportunity to finally replace the decade-old kludge of dual analogue sticks. Sony and Nintendo both seem to have embraced this. Some Wii games have already demonstrated this potential. Every first person game on that system controls better – faster, more accurately and most importantly more intuitively – with a pointer than a stick.

    With Natal, having to gesture through the interface like you’re directing traffic is a great technical achievement, and one that I’m sure someone will be able to deliver some good specialised games around, but what I want to be able to do as a gamer is control a pointer (in 2D space – if it can do 3D, so much the better), on screen, at 60 frames per second. Everything else is just glitter.