Is NATAL really any different than play station eye ?

[Andysw]

Cueil said:

jneul said:

slowmo said:

jneul said:
haha nice vid Goodfella, that really proves natal really is just nicking ideas from eyetoy, plus it does have a lag on natal, the motion control ideas for the wand look miles better than this imo.

So what else is a problem given your latest news having seen it first hand, oops you haven't so yet more anecdotal evidence.  If you mean the motion control ideas for the wand shown at E3 then you're really grasping because I didn't see anything to get me excited yet, and funnily enough neither did the vast amount of professional journalists there either.

Heres a question for you all dismissing Natal, if it is just the same as eyetoy why haven't Sony come out branding it as such?  The simple answer is they know exactly what the device is and know they cannot match it with just the eyetoy.  The fact Natal has the onboard processor dedicated for the task of calculating the motion capture and voice recognition alone makes a huge boost given there is no drain on the host consoles processing power.  Look at the video Goodfella posted again and see how much the PS2 is struggling just to run such a simple "game".  That is without going into the details of the IR camera for depth perception or the facial expression recognition software either.

Will Natal be a success, the answer to that question is still unlikely until we see the software that will be released but there is no doubt its a huge increase in technology over the PSEye.

well yeah what do you expect the technology was not as good back then, but more or less it is the same thing, but improved on natal of course. natal is going to struggle without an input device other than yourself as discovered by Sony, M$ are about 8 years behind Sony and Nintendo, unless they change it of course.

did anyone ever try the party games for eyetoy back on the ps2, well if you did you know what i am going on about, motion control needs more than just body movement alone for it to work with all kinds of games.

finally i agree with the whole presentation of sony wand seemed a bit rushed, but it did show true 1:1 control without any lag. maybe people are not as hyped because Sony are not hyping it as much as MS??

(edit: almost everything you have lags to some degree... you got an LCD tv or Plasma... better check out the lag on that baby cause it could be worse than your ping)

If the PSeye was just as good as Microsoft's Natal don't you think Microsoft would be using their current cam? I'll just throw up the wikipedia information :

 

The Project Natal sensor^[1] is an approximately 9-inch (23 cm) wide horizontal bar^[18] connected to a small circular base with a ball joint pivot, and is designed to be positioned lengthwise above or below the video display. The device features an "RGB camera, depth sensor, multi-array microphone, and custom processor running proprietary software",^[1] which provides full-body 3D motion capture, facial recognition, and voice recognition capabilities. The Project Natal sensor's microphone array enables the Xbox 360 to conduct acoustic source localization andambient noise suppression, allowing for things such as headset-free party chat over Xbox Live.^[1]

The depth sensor consists of an infrared projector combined with a monochrome CMOS sensor, and allows the Project Natal sensor to see in 3D under any ambient light conditions.^[1][19] The sensing range of the depth sensor is adjustable, with the Project Natal software capable of automatically calibrating the sensor based on gameplay and the player's physical environment, such as the presence of chairs.^[20]

Project Natal is reportedly based on software technology developed internally by Microsoft and hardware intellectual property acquired fromtime-of-flight camera developer 3DV Systems.^{[7][14][21][22][23][24]} Before agreeing to sell all its assets in March 2009,^[25] 3DV had been preparing its own depth-sensing webcam controller, known as the ZCam.^{[26][fn 2]}

Described by Microsoft personnel as the primary innovation of Project Natal,^{[29][14][24][30]} the software technology enables advanced gesture recognition, facial recognition, and voice recognition.^[22] The skeletal mapping technology shown at E3 2009 was capable of simultaneously tracking up to four users for motion analysis,^{[14][19][22][31]} with a feature extraction of 48 skeletal points on a human body at a frame rate of 30hertz.^[20][31] Depending on the person's distance from the sensor, Project Natal is capable of tracking models that can identify individual fingers.^[19][22]

I don't think that was the point he was making. He was just pointing out that the idea of natal and the eyetoy are the same. The idea of not using controls to control games.