Actually I probably did miss that. I remember people coming on stage to play the Wii. With Natal, all I remember was a closed door report of some Burnout demo which did not even handle well being played. I remember hundreds of people queued to play the Wii and they were given the opportunity to. Correct me if I'm wrong but how come I've not read those reports from gamers and ordinary people so far. Not 'techies' as you put it.

10ms to recognize a pose.

10ms == 10% framerate, if frame time == 100ms. (10 FPS)
10ms == 15% framerate, if frame time == 66.7ms (15 FPS)

Clearly, its 10ms on a single core, or MS is smoking something, when it comes to interactive framerates. Of course, 10ms of a single cores 16.7ms (for a single 60 Hz frame) is quite a lot of that core. About 15% of the Xenon's CPU, actually, near to what they stated. Perhaps a little more...

Unfortunately, its only 15% if the other two cores are not utilizing the L2 cache at all, and are, instead, both running threads that like.. add two registers, and put the results in a third register. During image processing, a large chunk of the cache will likely be blown, possibly several times, thanks to the hefty amount of data an image represents.

Here's the good info, though. Likely a good 30% of that time will be available on the other HW thread of the core, however, because there WILL be a lot of stalls during cache misses. Any game which doesn't do a lot of animation processing, vertex skinning (i.e. human/animal characters, mostly), or physics, is very likely to have not been using all 3 cores anyway. In a sense, Natal will be free for those kinds of games.

Sadly, that 10ms will severely impact the kinds of games the 360 is "known" for, like Halo, Gears, etc. Honestly though, I hope no one expected there to be a lot of Natal-ification of those kinds of games anyway. Natal is a party game accessory, obviously.

I'm not sure how you have missed it, and the closed door demos have been recieved very well.  The hundreds you are reffering to being cued up on the wii, would have been the tokyo game show which was late in the stage of the wii development, I remember watching G4's coverage of the event and how much they enjoyed it.  Natal will have that same opportunity shortly before it's release as well.  So you've missed every talk show and mainstream AP report about natal?  Something doesn't seem right with your comments, if you don't want to like it that is fine, just seems weird that you are going out of your way to create a reality that doesn't seem to exist, why not just say you don't like it and leave it at that.

Having read the last few pages, this is one of the few posts that makes sense. Other than that it's business as usual - people that don't even own a 360 (the same old faces) implying it's gonna suck and hoping it fails etc.

I'm not sure what the OP title is saying...

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/chipless-natal-why-cost-cutting-makes-sense-article

I sort of assumed that there was an internal separate "hand tracking" mode that used a detailed hand model instead of a full body skeleton, for the times when you needed to use a cursor-based interface in menus, media galleries etc.

Partly because I always assumed that MS wanted to push the very same tech for PCs in education, kiosks, mediacenters, and the very least you would need for universal operation is a precise multitouch pointing feature.

The way it is formulated I read as "a cube of approx. 4 cm side", but if it's a reference to the volume then it's not immensely better: cubic root of 4 cm^3 is approx. 1.6 cm. If it were to read the horizontal/vertical positioning of your hand to move a pointer on-screen that would translate, if you move your hand in a 80cm*50cm (x*y) range in the air, to an input resolution of about 50*30 "points". That would mean a step of almost an inch on your typical screen... only good for the roughest interface, and probably maddening if you ever have to select say music or videos from a list.

If the x/y resolution is 4 cm, that's even worse and you have to cut that in more than half, with on-screen steps of an inch and a half.

Using the angle of your arm (say shoulder-to-wrist) doesn't solve much: unless we're understanding the whole 4cm statement wrong, the angle computed from two points will have an even worse resolution (about half as much, actually).

Averaging helps, of course: at 30 samples per second you can average over, say, the last 10 samples and still have a somewhat responsive cursor. That brings a (square root of 10) factor to your resolution boosting it up to about 150*100, so that tracking the position of your hand in a vertical plane in the air will have an effective resolution of about a 1/5" on-screen. Unless it is 4 cm per side, then we're back to about 70*45 and half an inch.

Either way, it might be acceptable if the interfaces are designed for a rough input as in big buttons, highly zoomed in lists etc (think a smartphone interface). It is totally unacceptable as an input method for a shooter, though.

Oh well, maybe it's all wasted back-of-envelope math anyway. Let's wait to see more precise specs :)

Look if it comes across as trolling, I apologise. I don't mean to. I just seem to remember that more than a year before the Wii launched people had ordinary people had played and enjoyed it not people whose motives are not entirely clear one way or the other. If Natal is the future sure why not. I just feel, much of the hype has happened before any actual product has been shown and people are swooning over hardware which should never be the case. Anyway just my thoughts. Carry on thread.

hey i just watched that 200ms lag video, the input delay was horrible, i really don't know how anyone can be hyped about natal now, and surely now after taking out that internal chip the delay will be even worse

It is pretty clear that the 4cm correspods to xy resolution. Let's assume that the tof chip is an _expensive_ one with a pixel count of 320*240. with those 320 pixels you have to cover max 4 players hopping in front of you - about 5-6m wide space/320 = 1.6-2cm per pixel. The z resolution could be better depending on whether the tof camera depth resolution is programmable or not by developpers. 4cm z resolution would indicate the depth space covered is 256*4cm = 10meters which seems a bit high.