If the Sony thingie does not contain rumble features, then it is a plastic stick with a few buttons, a led in a ball, an ir-emitter, a custom ic and a battery. Around $10 to manufacture in large quantities. The RGB camera might be the eye-toy thing (another $15) or a higher-resolution camera (add $2-3). Now for the Natal bundle, the bill looks _far_ longer than that. You have the same cheap RGB stuff for visuals, but then the fun starts with the TOF camera stuff: the tof-chip, the (programmable?) precision tof-chip controller, ir pulsed diode, ir bandpass filter, memory interfaces (for both cameras), processor  (lowcost triple core ?), memory for images, (lots of) memory for the software, power supply and whatnot. If you bought the tof stuff now as a single unit, you would have to fork over around $8000. Obviously, mass manufacturing will bring those costs down considerably, but >95% (not counting the software) ?

The difference is simple. Natal is being taken very seriously by Microsoft, and the Playstation Eye is not by Sony. At the end of the day, that's how most things that become big in gaming do. It's not about being first, it's about doing something at the right time and shouting in loud enough. By the time Natal launches, it might have over 3 times as many games as the PSEye has, and that's after the PSEye having 3 years on the market. How many retail games are there again after two years? Eye of Judgment and Eyepet? Whoopdie doo.

The technology doesn't matter. The dedication to the hardware is the difference maker.

no! it is not... the only thing that is different is MS hype. nothing new to see here, but lets see how many consumers that will get lured into this already old tech.

The software doesn't add cost on a per unit basis, its simply a fixed cost and you forgot the rumble (its a likely addon for tactile feedback) which means two pairs of royalties to whomever won that lawsuit and a pair of blu tooth units to interface with the PS3. I cannot comment on the rest at this time as I have a dog to walk.

It certainly shows that Sony has never been sure about the motion stuff technology and still isn't. The key problem of Natal is the complexity and the completeness of the interface it has to offer to programmers. What I have seen as (real or supposed) Natal demos so far offers absolutely nothing of what differentiates Natal from Sony's way. At this time, the Natal programmer's interface is apparently still in its "collect wishes of the companies and create a programmer's interface bible". By the time Natal launches, we might see a plethoria of wii-look-a-like games but very few Xbox-specific titles.

no, I honestly didn't know that. a question for you though: where were these millions and billion of people when this tech (although a bit older) released on THE BEST SELLING SYSTEM OF ALL TIME? I sure didn't see all these non-controller gamers rush to the stores because they were finally able to play videogames without controllers. Natal will not fail, mainly because of massive hype, but there are certainly not millions and billions of people that are intimidated by controllers. if there were, eye toy would've sold much better.

and natal is doing what? not trying to mimic eye toy? please... when did eye toy release? 6 years ago? maybe even more. for a company like MS with all their resources I would expect a MUCH BIGGER IMPROVEMENT from the eye toy than what we have saw at e3. and ps3 wand is inferior to the wiimote because?? the wiimote is crap..

and i agree with this statement.

And when the dog comes back, you might explain what you wanted to say with "The software doesn't add cost on a per unit basis". I can assure you that software adds a substantial part to the production costs of Natal - particularly when looking at the feature list MS has promised. (Same thing as rrod costs. Those roughly $1.5b used for rrods added $50 production cost to every one of the first 30m XBoxes). On a sidenote, I seriously doubt that Sony will have to pay additional blu tooth royalties for the gadgets. (These royalties are usually "wholesaled" - unless you sign dumb contracts. Regardless, we are talking cents here).

If the software cost $1,000,000 to create and you make 100 units of Natal or 1000 units or 1,000,000 units the cost of the software remains the same as its a fixed cost. It adds to the overall cost but whether they make 1 or 1,000,000,000 the cost of the software has already been paid for in their research and development budget. Natal in a large part has been created from a lot of pre-existing R+D programs within Microsoft.

I wasn't talking about Blu Tooth royalties I was talking about the cost of the recievers and the cost for implementing rumble (for which they lost a lawsuit for and now pay royalties) as they will want feature parity at least for the controller with the Wiimote. Its cheap but its worth noting anyway.

Where did you get the $1.5B figure from for RROD?

Finally I thought about things as I was walking the dog. Why don't you tell me what you know of the likely costs because I don't want to spend too much time finding out things you already know.

Millions..... and that is what you are most afraid of.

What Sony will be doing is trying to ignore Microsoft and focusing on their own products, its not till something like E3 that they will look at all the figures and launch some propaganda, this is part of the reason why Sony are so bad at advertising.