Hey Brett, you should make the 'numbers up' thread for once. :-p

Actually, I would like to see the VGChartz write up of Natal, soon. It would go a long way to dispell some of the mis-information that's floating around.

I think the hype was to be expected - Natal was shown in just the right way to generate column inches, I believe.  I agree that while its promising, when you take a step back its not as impressive as the huge reaction implies.  At least not yet.  Give my a great 3D Myst or similar title using the interface, or something unexpected, coupled with clever 'augmentation use' such as leaning in an FPS and I'll be more excited for it.  Or a Gladiator game where I fight holding a shield and sword (hang on, that's the PS3 wands I'm thinking of)... well, you get the idea.

Yes, all those who doubt Natal will be punished! Right, d21lewis?

I'm not saying that a war between man and machine is coming.....I'm just saying I think R.O.B. the Video Robot and Natal are pretty awesome.

(take the hint, dammit!)

ioi said: Hey Dan, you should be writing up impressions

Working on it  

According to some people, it's jsut a souped up version of what Sony and Nintendo already have...and inferior by some standards...it's all smoking mirrors of M$...lol...but developers have the kits in their hands...maybe that was smoking mirrors as well...

I'll take that hint and raise you a dirty thought.

Even if Natal doesn't offer what it promises on day one, I'm sure it will offer such experiences, eventually. I mean, we didn't expect the Wii to do what it did in those promos, but it did just that. We didn't believe that the PS3 would offer graphics worthy of those 2005 CGI Killzone videos, and it did just that. Why is it so hard to believe that Microsoft can't give us what they promised? If there's one thing I've learned this gen, it not to underestimate anybody anymore.

I remember there being some kind of spy software for the Eyetoy, back in the PS2 days. I wouldn't have expected that, back then. I'm willing to bet that not only will Natal deliver on what they've shown, they're going to give us experiences that we haven't even thought about.

*takes big swig of Microsoft Kool-Aid*

I had my reservations about it, but the more I think about it, the more I have to say, "I'm in".

Depending on who you talk to, the technology to produce NATAL well hasn't been around for long and may not even exist yet ...

The digital sensors that are used to capture videos are (from my limited understanding) not different from the ones that are used to capture still images and when they capture videos you only use a small portion of a much larger sensor to capture a particular frame, and over time (in about  a second) you use the entire sensor and cycle back to the first frame. This approach has been used to capture images at 120fps at very low resolutions and is currently being used on state of the art digital camcorders to produce video at 720p/1080p at 30fps.

Now, I don't know the technical details, but I suspect that NATAL captures images at below HD Resolutions (probably very close to SD) at 30fps in order to keep manufacturing costs down. It probably doesn't have the best lenses, and a person at 6 to 10 feet away from the camera is probably pretty blurry and has some distortion (like you would see from a web-camera). On top of this, processing power alone limits their ability to track more than a couple dozen datapoints, which means that the system can focus on the big picture for a person (there skeleton) or small details (hands or face) but probably not both at the same time; and certainly not both at the same time for multiple people.

5 years ago the technical limitations of an affordable product prevented it from being produced, and 5 years from now the technical limitations will be so minimal that it will be easy to realise a device like this. The question that remains is whether the technology exists today ...