JaggedSac said:
DM235 said:
rover said:
That video's actually interesting. Fantastically lame, but interesting.
RGB camera is limited by room brightness, depth camera works in pitch black. I don't know about you, but I am not playing in a fully-lit room most of the time.
RGB camera to "track" a 2D image != depth camera which tracks 3D regardless of lighting.
If Sony's had this for so long, what the F? Where is it? Why hasn't it been capitalized upon?
If this has been around since the PS2, then how does that not equal a fail for Sony?
It's easy to throw stones at the Natal, it's easy to say "we've already done/got that", but man if Sony HAS this stuff, what's taking them?
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RGB camera uses the visible spectrum of light. The Natal "depth" camera uses infrared light. Both cameras would use light intensity and contrast to determine where an object is in "3D" space.
Whereas the RGB camera can have trouble dealing with variable room lighting, an infrared camera would have trouble with variable infrared lighting (candles, fireplaces, and potentinally you if you work up a sweat).
The E3 videos show some lag with Natal, but it is still a beta product. We'll just have to wait and see what Microsoft can do before it launches.
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Actually RGB cameras rely mainly on edge detection for depth, it has nothing to do with light intensity other than the fact that the better the light, the easier it is to detect edges. This can be very difficult to do and can only provide relational depth information. Such as the person got bigger, so they must have moved forward some, now use an algorithm to come up with some distance that was just covered. While each pixel in Natal's system has an associated depth to go with it, and all objects(such as other players) can be exactly related in 3D space to each other. No guess work involved at all.
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That explains why Sony went with the glowing ball on their motion controller. You could accurately measure the distance by measuring the size of the ball. And the fact that it glows would help overcome low light conditions.
As for Natal, to measure that depth does it now have to send out an IR beam and then measure the intensity of the IR light reflected back? Or if it uses a passive method then is works just like an RGB camera but with infrared light.
You've made me curious as to how exactly this technology works. Time to hit Google...
