Natal seems to be a more sophisticated and technologically advanced version of the Eye-Toy, and I think their might be some theoretical advantages to this approach. I fully believe that Natal hype comes from the Mylo demo which I expect will be just like every other Peter Molyneux which is over-promised and under-delivered; and in most cases the hype talks about a revolutionary breakthrough, and what is delivered is an incremental improvement over what has come before it.
The main thing that may make Natal just like the Playstation eye is the kind of software that will likely be produced for it ... I could be wrong but I suspect that (in the range of) 95% of all software produced for Natal will be ports of games already produced for the Playstation Eye/Eye-Toy or existing camera system; or it would be a direct clone of these games. The other 5% of games might be truly designed around Natal, and if they’re not particularly good, interesting or different from what was produced for the eye-toy Natal will go down as a (probably expensive) clone of an 8+ year old PS2 add-on.
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