the way i understand natal to work: a 3d image is taken of the room from which the natal interprets your body position returning to the xbox 360 your body position tracked to 28 (i forget the exact number) specific joints in your body. in some of the demonstrations (specifically the GMA demo) it is obvious that loose clothing causes the natal to have issues deciding tracking you. it was tracking Matt's suit jacket and therefore his waist was glitching somewhat.

So what's my point? If you had a plastic sword and shield i'd bet $10 the natal would have a lot of issues tracking you if it could track you at all. the issue is completely on the software side but MS has a choice - go with no pieces of plastic props or program in specific corrections for each prop you could or could not be using. not exactly an "easy" fix.

I agree that tactile feedback is extremely important.

Sometimes just wawing in the air is enough, but for many gameplay elements you really need a controller, stick, sword, racing wheel or anything to make it feel immersive.

I would be happy if Natal would be combined with all sorts of peripherals depending on game genre. That they'd have like 4-5 standardized  periferals like the nunchuck, Wii-racing wheel and that kind of stuff.

Not sure props would suffer from the same issues as loose clothing.  loose clothing obstructs natals ability to see the joints of the body, or might give it truble due to the fact that loose cloth changes shape and therefore might be hard to identify/track.  A plastic sword or gun would not really seem to present the same problems.

On a side note (natal should in theory be able to do one to one head tracking).  If a game was made where all natal does is track where you look and the view changes accordingly, and then a regular 360 controller was used for everything else, it would offer full 3d games without glasses (it'd be like looking through a window into the game)

to the first part: i think it would, it's not like natal does a material analysis to tell what it is looking at is plastic.  it's taking the shape it seeing as mapping it to a human figure and any prop you hold it going to distort that human figure into something natal may not be able to understand without programing a completely separate algorithm.  i mean, if you have a sword in the left hand is natal going to understand that it's a sword or is it going to think your left arm is longer than your right arm?  or will it maybe just assume the figure in front of it isn't human at all because it doesn't have the correct shape?

to the second part: i completely agree, headtracking is imo the one thing natal is going to do extreemly well that is going to be completely awesome.  i really hope developers put their focus into that area of the natal and then i'll be very happy to pick one up.

Oh yeah, tactile feedback is an easy problem to solve. Might even improve the fidelity of the controls themselves by having something distinct to scan.

The real problem is the lack of buttons and thumbsticks. This is also an easy problem to fix, but not as cheap as finding a lid and calling a steering wheel or finding a stick and calling it a sword.

All ms has to do is to invent the Star trek replicator and we are set.

This is crazy because i remember ppl bitchin about the wii wheel and the zapper saying that why should we buy that dumb cheap plastic shit, its no good, it doesn't feel right in my hands, etc. So why now with the Natal its cool to buy cheap plastic swords and stuff? I really want to know.

Yeah. Without something to hold in their hands, gamers will slowly evolve into mimes. Nobody likes mimes.

Because its for our console, the X360 now lol.

I'd love to hold a sword in an RPG, that's all I know.

lol at least your honest.