Natal and Wand to reach beyond Wii says EA Europe's senior VP

[NJ5]

JaggedSac said:

NJ5 said:

Maybe people are limited in their vision, but Microsoft hasn't yet shown any evidence (or even an indication) that Natal will work well for anything but simple games.

It doesn't seem to be able to detect fingers, or to provide an IR-aiming like feature. These two things alone, if true, will severely limit what games are possible on it. I glanced at your thread and some of your ideas seem to depend on being able to place things precisely on the screen. Of course this can be made with gestures instead of aiming, but that makes it similar to using a D-pad...

The stuff we saw working on Natal was very rough, without much precision in terms of control. Until we know for sure, it's very hard to have faith on something which capabilities we don't even know.

 

The lack of finger detection is definitely a let down, but it is by no means the end of gaming possibilities.  Even if it did detect fingers, you would not be able to point at something on the screen directly.  Natal has no idea where the screen is, unless you begin the game by doing some sort of calibration such as "Here I am, here is my tv".  The way on screen control is going to be done via Natal is all relative to the body.  The distances your hands are from your body are translated to screen coordinates.  Pretty simple actually since Natal has the (x,y,z) position of your entire body.  Plus, this gives allows for direct manipulation of on-screen items in 3 dimensions.  Move your hand forward and the on-screen indication moves forward as well, by getting smaller.  I really don't see how you can judge any accuracy from anything we have seen so far.

Obviously calibration relative to the screen would be needed, that would be the easy part.

Didn't they say the other day that accuracy was about 4 cm? What we saw in terms of accuracy was that "Paint Party" demo, which looked more like throwing buckets at the wall than actual painting.

I hope I'm wrong. If I'm wrong, it's because MS has done a piss poor job of showing Natal's capabilities.