Checking In On Project Natal 186
itwbennett writes "A couple of interesting articles followed Robbie Bach's announcement at CES that Project Natal, Microsoft's controller-free Xbox 360 control system, will be shipping in time for the 2010 holiday season, writes blogger Peter Smith. First, Popular Science has a nice look at how Project Natal works, focusing mostly on the software and how 'Microsoft engineers are teaching the Natal 'brain' what various parts of the human body look like so that Natal can tell your ascot from your elbow.' Microsoft is staying mum on the hardware, although Smith notes that we know it involves an infrared camera. 'If you don't care about how the tech works but just want to know if it'll be worth buying,' writes Smith, 'you might be interested in an interview with Robbie Bach in the Financial Post. In the interview Bach claims that 70%-80% of Xbox 360 developers are working on some kind of Natal-enabled gaming software, and he assures us that first-party studios are also hard at work.'"
Natal Brain? (Score:2, Interesting)
Am I the only one (Score:4, Interesting)
Not simply "infrared" (Score:3, Interesting)
It seems it's a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-of-flight_camera [wikipedia.org] , made with the tech MS acquired from 3DV Systems.
In the form of Natal, certainly cheap. Mighty fun stuff; somebody will finally make, using also this thing, robotic overlords good enough to doom us all.
Assuming there will be free Windows SDK at the least, of course... (or, even better, the protocol will be clear enough to figure out easily into lib usable across platforms)
What kind of games will actually use it? (Score:5, Interesting)
With word coming out that they removed Natal's processor and it'll now use anywhere from 10% to 33% of the 360's own processing power, just how good will the games be? There's going to be a price in what developers can you do when you chop that much CPU time out of the system compared to a standard game.
I dunno, I like the idea, but it seems like something Microsoft should bundle with their next system and not tack on to the 360.
Other uses (Score:2, Interesting)
After it has learned how to predict our movements, couldn't this be used to kill us with guns? There was a 60 minutes piece on the virtual fence--most interesting part for nerds was the AI system to recognize what to show to people. Apparently rolling sagebrush and various fauna were triggering too many false positives.
Good stuff.
Combined with 3D (Score:3, Interesting)
Just think of Natal combined with three dimensional televisions. Now there is an interface that I can get behind.
Because There Is No 'Next Gen' Xbox (Score:2, Interesting)
This is it.
Slapping motion controls on the junk old Xbox 360 hardware is the only option for Microsoft other than just pulling the plug on the whole mess. Search is Ballmer's new baby and it is looking like it is on track to rack up Xbox style billions in losses.
Giving Robbie Bach the green light to spend the billions it would take to design and manufacture new Xbox hardware is about as likely as Microsoft switching Windows and Office to the GPL. The Xbox 360 was supposed to be the console that E&D finally got right after the first Xbox disaster. All sorts of promises were made that a repeat of the first Xbox marketplace flop and losses wouldn't happen again with the Xbox 360.
New Xbox hardware isn't going to happen. Ever.