Lee on Xbox Natal

[famousringo]

Procrastinato said:

badgenome said:

Procrastinato said:
I hope they sell proper room lighting with the system. I believe it may be necessary to illuminate your livingroom much like the E3 setup for the system to work properly.

Sadly, I'm not joking.

Actually, Kotaku and others have said that they tried it out in some dimly lit hotel room settings. Word is that it doesn't require much lighting, if any.

The Natal device itself would have to paint the users without lighting, and from a lot of different angles too.  Lee's own blog states that the system comes up with a 3D image, and its not going to come up with such a thing without a lot of thorough data input, via light or sound.  I'm kinda suspicious of these reports.

We'll see I guess.  I have a strong feeling that some sort of marker device (like Sony's wand, or a Wiimote, possibly in wearable form) will be necessary in the end product, for the system to truly work decently enough to be viable.

As I understand it, Natal doesn't need lighting because it's an active sensor, not a passive one. It doesn't rely on light in the environment bouncing off an object and into the camera, it sends out its own pulses of infrared light and measures how long the light takes to return to construct its 3D image.

Now, Natal does also have a conventional video camera which would rely on environmental light, but that seems to have little to do with the interface. It mostly just seems to be for scanning people and objects and sending those pictures to the software. You could still play Burnout in a dark room, you just couldn't videoconference with your cousin.