Anybody who has heard ANYTHING about E3 has certainly heard about the new motion sensing technology presented by Microsoft and Sony, and there are several different opinions of which will be better. With that spirit in mind, I would like to offer my own opinions…
First I’d like to say that both Microsoft’s Project Natal and Sony’s PlayStation Eye Tracking are amazing. They both blew my mind when I saw the demonstrations and I honestly didn’t expect anything like that when I heard they’d been working on Motion Technology. Now getting on to specifics…
Project Natal is Microsoft’s new experience in gaming. It does a full body HD scan that can track people’s movements in a 3D environment which is pretty impressive. They also boasted that it had speech recognition and showed off what seemed to be a very intelligent AI called Milo who responded to questions and interacted with the user. This system uses no controller and solely relies on movement of the human body.
Although I think Project Natal was very impressive, I thought the lack of a live Demo really took away from its shock factor and I wish they would have had someone demonstrate its capabilities on stage. Its ability to track movements of someones body is extremely impressive and although I did see what looked to be a little lag between movements in real life and the movements on screen, I think it can only get better from there.
That being said, it really seemed to be a beefed up version of the PlayStation Eye, and I think by eliminating the controller, they’ve made a crucial mistake. I really hope they reevaluate that decision once they see that most gamers want something tangible to hold on to. I also heard that Milo wasn’t as intelligent as he appeared to be in the presentation, and they may have some glitches to fix when dealing with the Z-Axis movement. Other than that, it really is a revolutionary technology and I can’t wait to see what they can do with it once it comes out.
Sony’s Motion Controller paired with the PlayStation Eye was amazing to watch and the most impressive thing was that they did everything live on stage. Because they were able to show the audience in real time what the controller could do, I think they made much more of an impact than Microsoft did with Project Natal.
The Motion Controller + PlayStation Eye tracks movement of the controller perfectly 1:1 and there is NO lag from real movement to on screen. They were able to put items and weapons in the player’s hands on screen which then completely interacted with the environment they were placed in. Even though the movement was very impressive, Microsoft’s Natal is a more powerful piece of technology when it comes to the camera. This is something Sony is going to have to work on to compete with Microsoft.
http://www.n4g.com/xbox360/News-343672.aspx
