Because corporate IP policies are such that any company can blatantly rip-off anothers ideas and suffer no consequences?  Brilliant reasoning, here, really.

Given the developer interest expressed in Natal, you can be sure that Sony would be proclaiming how the Eyetoy (actually I think it is the PS Eye on the PS3) could do the exact same things, if it could.  But Sony has not said these things, only Sony fans do...funny how that is.

Not caring for Microsoft or the 360 is not a crime, hell, lots of people on these boards don't.  But try to temper your allegiance with a small bit of rational thought before posting, please.

It's similar but i think natal is dseigned to do more than we can fully grasp as just users

This is random but am i the only one that thinks of Nutella when i hear Natal?  Like when i hear "Natal"..im waiting to here the "ah" part right after lol

I'll let you in on a little secret ...

None of these companies really "invent" these products, and they tend to work off of evolutions of ideas that are presented in HCI research labs at a variety of universities; and they try to take these rough implementations and convert them into real world products. To be fair to these companies though, they do heavily fund this research though. It is rarely the technology that is impressive, and it is usually the use of a technology in an unexpected way that makes these products possible.

The Wiimote is (essentially) the combination of a gyroscopic mouse, a direct pointing interface, and the NES controller joined together to create a viable 1-hand controller; and when combined with the nunchuck (half of a conventional game controller) the potential expressiveness and utility of the controller grows exponentially. Advances in technology like wireless communications and solid-state "gyroscopes" enabled the Wiimote to become a product, but it is really the unconventional joining of multiple interfaces that make it popular.

Project Natal in concept has never been any different than the eyetoy, and the primary difference between the two is the implementation of Natal uses different technology. The sad thing is that this "product" has been tried time and time again in both commercial applications and in the lab and (most) people do not prefer it to a conventional user interface. Now, people within Microsoft (and XBox fanboys) probably assume that it was limitations in the technology that prevented people from choosing eye-toy (or similar devices) but I'm much more skeptical; and I suspect that something is missing from people seeing value in these kinds of products for the most part.

Now, with that said, there is a rapidly growing genre (fitness games) that can use this kind of information to improve the quality of product; but beyond that I think the concept of Natal/eyetoy is really waiting for voice recognition and natural speech analysis to develop to a level where bi-directional conversations work in a more natural way before it can catch on.

i find the most impressive part not that the eyetoy can mimic the same input as natal. no, the most impressive part to me is that give a similar input device, both companies came up with the exact same idea for an application.

Lmao, Natal technically impressive. i yet to see something about it being impressive...
only saw the katamari one which is done before.
and the burnout one which was crap and unresponsive

I agree with your first 2 paragraphs.

In regards to the bolded, the Sony engineer in this video states that using color for motion detection has issues and the "z-cam" that he is displaying does it much better.

As for Project Natal being no different, I would have to disagree on that point.  It is not just about motion detection, it is the marriage of motion detection, vocal recognition, and visual recognition(facial, etc) put into a single hardware unit, with an SDK that supports all those functions right out of the box.  No need for each developer that wants to use it to develop their own solutions.  The hardware also has a chip inside of it that takes the load of processign these inputs and allows developers to treat it like any other controller input.  It is in this simplification of these processes that developers will be able to utilize these things more easily and cheaply.  MS was able to put these software solutions in Natal due to various MS research teams already having developed the software for this stuff.

As for game uses.  I am putting one out a day in another thread.

its funny how Xbox fanboys are praising Natal as the best thing ever and we still haven't seen anything amazing about it, and what we saw is fairly limited.

Also funny that PS3 fanboys are all praising the Eyetoy when 90% of them not owning it or never knew what the heck is it before Natal was announced.

Exactly. Just as when Nintendo showed off their motion controls with Wii, and demoed ways in which it could be used, Sony did the same with it's motion controller, but what? No copycatting there? Seriously, it's not "copy catting" versus a demoed way in which to show the potential of a certain product. When your dealing with a camera that tracks movement in a 3D space, and you need to apply it to games, guess what? It'll be really simple and effective to show someone hitting dodgeballs into the background to knock over bricks...get over it.

btw heres the video that dude talking about