Natal launch details leak from secret Microsoft tour

[JaggedSac]

Smidlee said:

JaggedSac said:

It is still using color to track to bright balls.  So it is a 1:1 mapping to two glowing orbs.  Not a 1:1 mapping with an entire body like Natal.

RGB just isn't as good for motion tracking as IR.  Which is what my question to Serious was about, since he stated that it is just a PSEye.  Which it clearly isn't, as stated by the horse's mouth.

This video is referring to the millions of possible colors that someone could be wearing. The whole purpose of the ball instead just track someone arm/hand is the ball will be one of four colors which is a lot easier to program the camera to track. Thus the PS eye has a lot easier time tracking the ball than your face, hands, arms,etc.

 IR  is nothing more than a certain color itself so I don't see why a camera could just as easy track a glowly red ball.

The color in the video that the engineer is referring to is the output from an RGB camera.  Detecting body parts and depth using only colors and edges is not an easy thing to accomplish and is in fact not particularly accurate and prone to many discrepancies.  The balls will be used because they are a standard shape and brightness, so the software will know the exact distance that the object is at due to the size of the circle of color.

Natal uses IR pulses to generate an "image" of depth.  The brightness of each pixel corresponds to its depth, there is no guess work involved to determine how far away it is, and the background is effectively separated from the player.  They use software and the depth information to determine a 48 point skeleton, which is then output to the 360 much like controller output.  Natal can track each body part just as easily as the PS3 motion system can track the balls, which corresponds only to the ability of Natal's ability to track the hands.