According to Audiomotion Studios, Microsoft’s NATAL technology “guesses” where people are moving rather than knowing the exact position of the player. Catching up with the high-tech company as they performed the awesome task of strapping Tiger Woods into a mo-cop suit for Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf, GamesRadar also enquired about how the studio is helping Microsoft with their upcoming motion controlling technology. Regarding the collaboration, Audiomotion’s Mark Rank said:
“We’re working closely with quite a few different people – developers from Microsoft who have been analysing our data compared to how Natal sees it. It’s just an approximation. They’re just trying to guess where people are moving and how people are moving and what it’s actually doing, whereas with us we can measure it to sub-millimetre precision. There’s a big, big difference there. And obviously the lag and frame-rate is considerably different as well.”
When pushed as to whether or not NATAL will actually work as advertised, Rank states: “I hope it works, yes. [laughs].”
It should be noted that Sony’s competing motion technology also performs an amount of extrapolation as to where the Move controller is at any time, especially when the glowing orb of innuendo is placed behind the player’s back. That said, we reckon it’s probably a lot easier to track a coloured ball that may drop out of line of sight for a moment compared to some drunk lunatic who gets startled by the cat, stumbles and ends up wrapped in the living room curtains.
Source: GamesRadar
http://www.thesixthaxis.com/2010/05/17/natal-guesses-players-movement/
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As long as it works I say!!
