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Forums - Nintendo - Nintendo's 'Natal' ?

Ryudo on 30 June 2009

Remember MS is RICH.  They just buy tech that is already around.



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bardicverse on 30 June 2009

Hey O-D-C, apparently Ubisoft helped with Natal. They also are building their own motion camera for the Wii. Now that Nintendo has seen the trick MS had up its sleeve, the big N might just tweak their joint effort on the Ubi-Cam to work a bit more like Natal. The Ubi-Cam, from what E3 said, will be out in 09. If it's anywhere close to what Natal can do, it will not only have let the air out of MS' tires, it will have straight up slashed them.



ironman on 01 July 2009
bardicverse said:

Hey O-D-C, apparently Ubisoft helped with Natal. They also are building their own motion camera for the Wii. Now that Nintendo has seen the trick MS had up its sleeve, the big N might just tweak their joint effort on the Ubi-Cam to work a bit more like Natal. The Ubi-Cam, from what E3 said, will be out in 09. If it's anywhere close to what Natal can do, it will not only have let the air out of MS' tires, it will have straight up slashed them.


Hmm so first nintendo didn't want it, then  when they saw how awsome it really was, they tried to copy it, from a compeditor, nice. I guess now nintendo is scrambling to save face. Sorry but the Ubisoft is just another Eyetoy with a decent app behind it. Unless it has 3D fullbody motion sensing in conjuction with Voice Recognition software, Nintendo 'aint lettin' the air out of anybody's tires.



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Dazkarieh on 01 July 2009
ironman said:
bardicverse said:

Hey O-D-C, apparently Ubisoft helped with Natal. They also are building their own motion camera for the Wii. Now that Nintendo has seen the trick MS had up its sleeve, the big N might just tweak their joint effort on the Ubi-Cam to work a bit more like Natal. The Ubi-Cam, from what E3 said, will be out in 09. If it's anywhere close to what Natal can do, it will not only have let the air out of MS' tires, it will have straight up slashed them.


Hmm so first nintendo didn't want it, then  when they saw how awsome it really was, they tried to copy it, from a compeditor, nice. I guess now nintendo is scrambling to save face. Sorry but the Ubisoft is just another Eyetoy with a decent app behind it. Unless it has 3D fullbody motion sensing in conjuction with Voice Recognition software, Nintendo 'aint lettin' the air out of anybody's tires.

Well, Natal is also another Eyetoy. Simple as that. All the other features is software related. Even my 5 years old mobile phone recognizes my voice.



     

 

WereKitten on 01 July 2009
dcIKeeL said:


Wow ok. The Natal camera is not just one camera but two 3D cameras. They can register depth as well as the standard stuff cameras like the eyetoy register. The fact that it's 2 cameras gives it more versatility and allows it to differentiate between different people and objects. Voice command and voice recognition are not the same thing. Sometimes these to techs can be called the samething (voice recognition). Voice command is simply a device that's able to register voice and coupled with the right software gives actions to the words and phrases it registers.

Voice recognition in the way Natal implements the term is being able to not only register voice, but doing it more intelligently. Instead of relying almost entirely on software, Natals' hardware can do most of the registering AND assigning on it's own. More importantly, Natal can differentiate once again between different people. Natal essentially can distinguish your voice from that of a friends or family member. The hardware is also advanced enough that when coupled with appropriate software allows for recognition of tones and emotions in both voice and facial recognition.

It's really annoying when people claim that Natal is the same as other cameras in video gaming today. People that claim this nonsense should be banned for excessively absurd trolling and flamebaiting! Next time anyone gets stuck on this nonsensical nonsense, ask yourself: If the existing camera tech you are considering was truly as innovative and advanced as the Natal camera, why aren't it's manufacturers using it?

Actually for what I know it's a "normal" RGB camera plus an infrared one that uses an illumination grid of marker lines to reconstruct a depth map. If you want you can call the second one a "3d camera", though basically it elaborates displacement/resizing of the markers in a way not too dissimilar by what the Sony system does with the image of the glowing ball placed on the wand controllers.

The vantages of using this infrared+grid setup is that they want to map whole bodies, not a discrete set of controllers, and match it to a skeletal model. So it's more in the whole architecture of the modelling software (depth map-> skeletal model) than in the tech of the camera itself.

The voice technology as well as the face recognition is basically software, though maybe the actual final piece of hardware might have specific silicon to accelerate some processing. Nintendo could indeed implement some of it, with the CPU and memory limitations of the hardware they work with.



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ironman on 01 July 2009
Dazkarieh said:
ironman said:
bardicverse said:

Hey O-D-C, apparently Ubisoft helped with Natal. They also are building their own motion camera for the Wii. Now that Nintendo has seen the trick MS had up its sleeve, the big N might just tweak their joint effort on the Ubi-Cam to work a bit more like Natal. The Ubi-Cam, from what E3 said, will be out in 09. If it's anywhere close to what Natal can do, it will not only have let the air out of MS' tires, it will have straight up slashed them.


Hmm so first nintendo didn't want it, then  when they saw how awsome it really was, they tried to copy it, from a compeditor, nice. I guess now nintendo is scrambling to save face. Sorry but the Ubisoft is just another Eyetoy with a decent app behind it. Unless it has 3D fullbody motion sensing in conjuction with Voice Recognition software, Nintendo 'aint lettin' the air out of anybody's tires.

Well, Natal is also another Eyetoy. Simple as that. All the other features is software related. Even my 5 years old mobile phone recognizes my voice.

Yeah, thats what fanboys are saying, but it's not true. NATAL is the Eyetoy ON CRACK!!! How well does you 5 year old phone recognise your voice? And since when did the eyetoy track full body motion in 3D? Sorry old chap, you are going to have to try a differant argument.



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Destroyer_of_knights on 01 July 2009

hell no, the DSi camera is shit house to begin with, it's it's not even a 1 megapixel camera, it's only 300K pixel camera, not only that, but that wiiware game which uses the camera, man that game can't recognise shit.



Dazkarieh on 01 July 2009
ironman said:

Yeah, thats what fanboys are saying, but it's not true. NATAL is the Eyetoy ON CRACK!!! How well does you 5 year old phone recognise your voice? And since when did the eyetoy track full body motion in 3D? Sorry old chap, you are going to have to try a differant argument.

Look, I'm not going to discuss point by point... you can call it an evolution, whatever! Realkisticaly, in terms of use, the only thing Natal does that Eyetoy can't is to identify different people. Everything else is software (voice recognition, facial recognition, material, so on). But if you want to think it's a complete revolution and you're happy with it, it's fine ;)



     

 

Galaki on 01 July 2009
deathbleachnarutodbz said:
nintendo said they reject the motion sencsig camera

+1

 

That said a lot about how successful it could have been.



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silentmac on 01 July 2009

Nintendo doesn't need a Natal competitor until next gen... so who cares...  WM+ isn't perfect but it is here now and cheap so it will sell...

I actually do agree though, MS doesn't have anything here that Sony/Nintendo couldn't copy unless they have a patent on a RGB/Infrared Camera combined hardware device...  The AI/voice recognition/facial recognition can be done with software and to some extent depth can be measured using light intensity/IR with the Sony option...  Either way, they need a controller to make it useful for traditional games like FPS because Natal as shown wasn't precise enough.

It will be interesting to see who comes out on top next gen though...  MS has impressive AI/voice recognition/facial recognition software.  Sony has a controller that looks to be more precise than WM+ for traditional games but no full body recognition.  And Nintendo has well...a pile of money from the Wii to come up with something new.  They will need it if the casuals decide they don't need another Wii next gen because they are losing quite a bit of support from the core with their ridiculous online setup (friend codes, no headset, no console wide online infrastructure) and focus on casual titles.



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