NATAL Changing the WorldatCES 2010!!!

[Avinash_Tyagi]

welshbloke said:

Avinash_Tyagi said:

JaggedSac said:

Avinash_Tyagi said:

JaggedSac said:

I am going to disagree and say that your definition fits firmly in the economical want category.  No one knew they wanted a Wii Fit until the Wii Fit was created.  There was never a need for people to be able to stand on a board and interact with a television set.

Except there is, its called the fitness market, fitness devices and videos show that there is a need

Ok, so you have defined at least one need for Natal.  And it has the capability to satisfy that need greater than any other comparable device on the market.

Again we get back to the issue of values and processes, the idea of a motion camera like NATAL may have the capability to reach out to such an audience, but not the way MS is trying to implement it, see the issue with incumbents trying to bring an innovation is they target it at their core in a way that actually destroys its disruptive abilities, Nintendo when they made Wii fit, actively designed the hardware around the software, with the intent of satisfying the need that I discussed earlier, MS doesn't know how to do that, nor are they even trying to launch NATAL in that manner, they themselves admit they are going to bring it to th e core first then try and move to the "casuals", like birdmen, without understanding the values and processes that made Nintendo so successful.

Microsoft are making Natal both the hardware and the software available for the 3rd party developers to develop. In the case of Natal the hardware was created in line with the software without the software the hardware is useless. As the boffin said in his 15 seconds of fame when describing the depth cam and how it defines the points on the skeletal.

What Natal does which is clever is remove the need for a board like we see in Wii Fit but more than that it builds upon it, not only does the camera sense motion but also the depth and skeletal which will only make for a more interesting and more challenging potential for a fitness package. Now whether a 3rd party can produce the software that engages like the Wii Fit package remains to be seen.

Lets imagine for a second. A Natal device could not only record the number of leg raises it could also assess how well the leg was raised. That I believe is the potential game changer element Natal has over the competition.

I think the Natal camera should always be referred to as a depth cam so as to emphasis the difference, maybe then the PS Eye comparisons can stop.

I'm afraid not, the software you are thinking of is the development libraries, I'm referrign to the actual end user software, the games themselves, the hardware is not being designed around the hardware, as MS doesn't have the software teams like Nintendo has.

See the problem with that is, we've seen what the third parties have produced in those regards on the Wii, failures compared to Nintendo, the reason is they don't understand the values of the downmarket like Nintendo does.

See the thing is, there is already software that will do that, on the Wii, but that isn't making large software sales, the reason is that the way the games are made doesn't appeal to the downmarket values, its not just about getting a technical up on the competition, the downmarket doesn't care about that, they want the game that appeals to their needs and values, and Wii fit succeeds at that, no other fitness software has come close.