worried ,....hah aha ha ha

Is there some rule that states that one can't also have a regular 360 controller while using Natal?

As for "Pause", one could come up with a body language gesture to say they want to pause, or they can come up with a Keyword they say, something like "Time Out". They could also do a sign of a "T" with their hands, to show they want to pause.

Come on man, don't you know that Natal includes an X-ray device?  What we should really be worried about is the radiation poisoning instead of silly false positives!

Seriously, though, I was watching the demos for the first time today and MS has their work cut out for them.  I'll believe the tech when it's available for anyone to play on the show floor.

There are many non-technical challenges that Microsoft will have to over come as well ...

There was a fairly large psychological barrier that people had to overcome when Nintendo released the Wii for it to become a successful system. A large portion of Nintendo’s success could probably be attributed to actually keeping their control systems grounded through familiar design. Before a system like NATAL can be successful consumers have to feel comfortable enough with the idea to buy into it, and being that they're focusing on how you don't need a controller, NATAL represents a pretty large psychological jump in how people imagine videogames.

Nintendo also took an image that had been used to put them in a negative light by their competition, made a few tweeks and reframed it in order to market themself successfully to a very broad market. Nintendo took the image they had a family friendly cosole that played "Kiddie" games and changed it to being a company that had an accessable (user friendly) console that played fun games. In contrast, Microsoft's current image is that they have a "Hardcore" (read: geeky) console that plays "Mature" (read:boring) games; there is a pretty large gap to bridge between the image the XBox 360 currently has and one they would need in order to attract the gamers who would (most) be interested in NATAL.

The last issue is the timing of the release ... In hindsight I don't think anyone would argue that CD was not going to be big for future games, but Sega was very foolish for releasing an addon for the Genesis to enable it to play CD games; and I don't think that many people would suggest that the Wiimote would have been successful had Nintendo released it as an addon for the Gamecube in 2005/2006.

Updated the OP with some new information regarding loose clothes. I wonder if the pants I'm wearing right now might cause problems controlling the accelerator in Burnout...

Some of these issues are a bit farcical (pause vs. paws). Some of these are real (loose clothing).

But biggest issues are:
1. Getting people to buy it who already have Xbox 360s.
2. Getting it out on time and at an affordable price.
3. Getting games that work with it and work well (the killer app).
4. Getting it to be responsive (delays in the videos are noticeable).
5. Getting people to let go of their inhibitions to use it.

Mike from Morgantown

Please note that threads that try to look at new things critically are not negative. They are though in some ways in reaction to hype-heavy threads that praise the new concepts without limit.

The biggest challenge they will face will be in game testing and debuging.

Tech demos are one thing, a full game is a whole differemt story and it can be a developer's nightmare

Regarding voice recognition tech,

What if the person speaks broken English or with heavy accent?
Or even no English at all?

How much effort does it take to develop for all the languages available to the market?

Loose clothing is a very interesting conundrum. Dresses even more. Wonder what they have in mind for those situations.

@kanariya - Most in depth voice recognition software has training involved. Where you speak paragraphs and the system trains itself to your speech patterns.

In my limited experience with voice recognition, the training works both ways. The software will both train itself to your voice, and train you to speak evenly and clearly so that it can more easily understand you.

That was for full speech-to-text, though. I expect command words would be more forgiving and distinct than having to recognize an entire dictionary.