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Radioactive IT Microsoft's Project Natal: the invisible game controller
Radioactive IT Microsoft's Project Natal: the invisible game controller | Microsoft's Project Natal: the invisible game controller |
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| by Mike Bantick | |
| Wednesday, 03 June 2009 | |
  
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History will record, that the Wii-mote pick up and play controller, along with the clever inclusion of Wii Sports to play, was enough to garner not only the faithful Nintendoites, but also a whole new demographic of folk who would not normally have considered themselves gamers. So after a few years of Nintendo dominance, and with only a couple of specific and small attempts to do the same sort of thing (SixAxis motion control, Lips motion activated microphones, Eye-Toy titles), both Sony and Microsoft have shown off their Wii-mote killing technology at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in LA this week. Steven Spielberg introduced Project Natal for Microsoft, and why not? In many ways the “invisible controller” set-up reminds us of scenes from Minority Report, where Tom Cruise manipulates a computer interface using nothing but body gestures. In a similar way, Project Natal utilises a 3D camera and microphone arrangement to recognise and compute individual people standing in front of their Xbox 360’s. When they step up to use the gaming system, the (obviously pre-calibrated) Natal device logs in that players specific Avatar to the Xbox 360 Experience. The tech built into Project Natal is impressive, it includes voice and facial recognition as well as special awareness and the ability to fill in the skeletal gaps by itself, that is, if the players arm is partially blocked by their body, the software is intelligent enough extrapolate the location of hands etcetera. Xbox Australia Product Manager, Andrew Jenkins is excited by the Project Natal possibilities: “Using your body to interact with games, and your Xbox LIVE experience, it is all done through what you do naturally, speak, move, dance, whatever, you are able to do that.” When it was put to Jenkins that Project Natal might simply be an amalgamation of Sony’s Eye-toy camera, Nintendo’s Wii-mote and a microphone, he was adamant that this should be treated as new. “To be clear, what we are doing is a completely new technology.” Jenkins said, “It is a 3D camera experience versus some of the other experiences such as the Eye-toy which is a 2D experience. All of a sudden the camera is reading depth, and it is recognising you not only with the camera, but also with the voice via the microphone. It is able to process, understand and execute that experience through a game that is what is going to revolutionise that vision for future games to take advantage of that 3D element that Project Natal offers” Microsoft showed off the tech at E3 this week, having a demonstrator play a 3D kick-ball break-out game called Ricochet. Pointing out that this is true all body involvement in a game, not just sitting on the couch with set waggle motions – an obvious dig at the Wii-mote controller. And the game did look like a good work out. Then there were the more sedate tech showings, with the voice command system getting a good going over in a painting demonstration, clearly recognising colour commands amongst others. Whist the software in the painting demonstration had an obviously short attentions life-span, the potential behind the technology was intriguing. Just using your hands to navigate through the pages of on screen Xbox interface, looked nice and futuristic, as did the auto sign on and voice capabilities, but these are things that look and sound cool to begin with, but have limited use long term. The Microsoft presentation only hinted at the ability to scale up to multiplayer for the technology also. All the displays were for a single player at a time. Ideas for Natal are sure to bloom over the coming months, Microsoft has not given any release date for the controller, but we believe developers (at least some) have been given access to the Natal API which will certainly have the creative juices immediately flowing. Should Nintendo be concerned – probably not, Project Natal is indeed impressive, and we cannot wait to see what developers come up with. But Nintendo have established their brand, got a great combination of hardware and, importantly, software packaged into a well priced product that will be hard to knock off without an equally compelling combo for a long time to come. For now we only have the cheesy marketing videos (such as the one below) to tide us over til developers come to grips with Natal’s potential. |
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