Do you guys find it strange Natal is getting all these awards from Popular Science and Time magazine yet MS own fanbase are kind of skeptical on the whole issue.

Don't get me wrong, I myself am willing to lineup at midnight during the freezing rain to get the Natal but even I'm not sure what the natal can do for gaming.

(perhaps these people were let into MS to see all the features we haven't seen yet) 

"but Microsoft has clearly shown that for innovative gameplay, it has all the right moves."

All the right moves? Announcing good hardware is 1 right move. Delivering, and bringing out some must have games are the other two right moves

No more so than your a sony one.

I just defend stuff I feel is being attacked for little to no reason.  And since this is mostly a PS3 stronghold someone has to do it.

A LOT of people have seen the end product.  Did you not watch ANY videos of the top Japanese developers talking about how blown away they were by the hardware?  Of course, just by the fact you keep saying Natal is just a camera confirms you have no idea what it is at all.

At least these people have actually used NAtal I'd wager unlike the pathetic haters in this thread.

Yeh its pretty difficult to get a balanced discussion in here these days. It almost as if the sony hoard from N4G transplanted themselves to VGChartz to start the same shit all over again. I guess this site will be worth poo very soon too.

Bet microsoft paid them to give them the award.

One way you know to get a lot of hate is to post positive about the 360 here.  Natal wins an award or has a positive article written about it and the hate just flows and flows...

A lot of people in and out of the industry that have hands on with the Natal seem to love it.  As a gamer if it works how they say I hope they make fun games for it.  Isnt that all that really matters?

I'm just skeptical of it's uses, and just how much it would add to gaming over a regular camera with proper software.

Facial recognition/tracking: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoH1IF5NdSQ
Body tracking: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au4d5anfjnA

I know that Natal is way more advanced than the Eyetoy. Don't get me wrong, the technology is great. But I don't see how it ADDS anything to gaming. Yes, developers seem to be excited, but so far, I haven't seen any concrete examples of how Natal will add anything to gaming. The one thing Natal has going for it right now, is the huge amount of hype Microsoft is putting behind it.

Maybe we'll see something at E3, but until then, I'll remain skeptical.

See, this is the fundamental problem with so many people on the forums and why we get SO many "PSEye can already do what Natal does" posts....it's because clearly people don't UNDERSTAND what Natal is.

The link you posted as "Facial recognition/tracking" is not the same facial recognition that Natal is doing.  We're talking the fundamental difference between knowing that a head is there and tracking the movement of it, and actually recognizing WHO the person is and being able to track facial cues for emotions, which is combined with the voice recognition to provide the developers with a lot of emotive feedback they can use.  Completely ignoring the fact that a bright room is required to do what they showed in that video and it was still glitchy.

What people don't seem to understand, or are unwilling to, is that it's not just about the hardware, it's the software that's driving the hardware that is equally important.  Can the PSEye be used for head tracking?  Sure, but that software needs to be coded, it doesn't come with the camera.  With Natal ALL the work is being done by the unit itself. 

Using a simple example, think of the PSEye as giving someone a blank computer with a freshly formatted hard drive and saying "Here, this computer can do a lot of stuff!  You just need to program your own operating system for it!" whereas Natal is "Here's your computer, with the operating system and all the software you need already installed."  Do you see the difference?

Sure, individually, all the tech that is on Natal has been done before to various degrees, but it's never been put together in a package like this with years of software development driving it.   The speech recognition software alone is based on many years of development by Microsoft, it's not something game developers can just code themselves on a game to game basis.