| HappySqurriel said: I'll let you in on a little secret ... None of these companies really "invent" these products, and they tend to work off of evolutions of ideas that are presented in HCI research labs at a variety of universities; and they try to take these rough implementations and convert them into real world products. To be fair to these companies though, they do heavily fund this research though. It is rarely the technology that is impressive, and it is usually the use of a technology in an unexpected way that makes these products possible. The Wiimote is (essentially) the combination of a gyroscopic mouse, a direct pointing interface, and the NES controller joined together to create a viable 1-hand controller; and when combined with the nunchuck (half of a conventional game controller) the potential expressiveness and utility of the controller grows exponentially. Advances in technology like wireless communications and solid-state "gyroscopes" enabled the Wiimote to become a product, but it is really the unconventional joining of multiple interfaces that make it popular. Project Natal in concept has never been any different than the eyetoy, and the primary difference between the two is the implementation of Natal uses different technology. The sad thing is that this "product" has been tried time and time again in both commercial applications and in the lab and (most) people do not prefer it to a conventional user interface. Now, people within Microsoft (and XBox fanboys) probably assume that it was limitations in the technology that prevented people from choosing eye-toy (or similar devices) but I'm much more skeptical; and I suspect that something is missing from people seeing value in these kinds of products for the most part. Now, with that said, there is a rapidly growing genre (fitness games) that can use this kind of information to improve the quality of product; but beyond that I think the concept of Natal/eyetoy is really waiting for voice recognition and natural speech analysis to develop to a level where bi-directional conversations work in a more natural way before it can catch on. |
I agree with your first 2 paragraphs.
In regards to the bolded, the Sony engineer in this video states that using color for motion detection has issues and the "z-cam" that he is displaying does it much better.
As for Project Natal being no different, I would have to disagree on that point. It is not just about motion detection, it is the marriage of motion detection, vocal recognition, and visual recognition(facial, etc) put into a single hardware unit, with an SDK that supports all those functions right out of the box. No need for each developer that wants to use it to develop their own solutions. The hardware also has a chip inside of it that takes the load of processign these inputs and allows developers to treat it like any other controller input. It is in this simplification of these processes that developers will be able to utilize these things more easily and cheaply. MS was able to put these software solutions in Natal due to various MS research teams already having developed the software for this stuff.
As for game uses. I am putting one out a day in another thread.
