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Forums - Microsoft Discussion - Project Natal drops hardware Motion detection to save costs!

slowmo on 08 January 2010
jneul said:
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


Mainly because the huge number of developers who have access to the technology are saying its amazing.  We have no idea of the final products performance yet so why bother guessing till E3 when solid information and previews will be made.  You have to admit the huge amount of hate Natal gets from people not interested in actually buying it, points quite heavily towards the fact that it scares certain parties with the hype its building.



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JaggedSac on 08 January 2010
WereKitten said:
JaggedSac said:
NJ5 said:

I've suspected since almost the beginning that Natal wouldn't be able to do IR aiming or anything similar... that suspicion has only grown to almost a certainty.

 

I don't think Natal can distinguish fingers anyway.  It can measure where the arm is pointing.  My question is whether it is a cube with volume of 4 cm?  Or is it a cube with 4 cm on each side?

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 :)

I am not sure if Natal is programable for different modes.  Kodu stated that his fingers would be able to be detected, but a childs would not.  And I imagine finger detection would require someone to stand close.

To be honest, I think there will have to be an on-screen "hand" with any Natal GUI interface.  In order to be able to directly point at a screen, Natal would need to know where the screen was.  The "hand" would need to be relative to something on your own body, perhaps your head, and the tranlsation from relative body distance onto screen corrdinates would need to be done.  Everything with Natal will need to be relative to your own person, otherwise Natal will need to be build into the screen.  In this case, the exact position isn't necessary.  You would just be moving the "hand" relative to where it was last.  It might jump around a little bit, but this could be fixed with some blurring algorithms.



JaggedSac on 08 January 2010
drkohler said:
WereKitten said:
JaggedSac said:

I don't think Natal can distinguish fingers anyway.  It can measure where the arm is pointing.  My question is whether it is a cube with volume of 4 cm?  Or is it a cube with 4 cm on each side?

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.

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.

Is Natal using TOF?  I read they are just reading the light intensity reflected back from the IR bursts.  I thought TOF based it on the time it took and not light intensity.  I am assuming they would correlate, but TOF is probably more expensive and accurate.



drkohler on 08 January 2010
JaggedSac said:

Is Natal using TOF?  I read they are just reading the light intensity reflected back from the IR bursts.

Hmm you got me there. I have to think a while to figure out if that is actually possible at all, considering the reflectivity of a volume element changes with angle of illumination. Just think of a mirror cube that rotates at a fixed axis in front of the camera. The reflected ir light would vary from 0% to 100% with the cube constantly at the same distance. That would refute your idea..



Alby_da_Wolf on 08 January 2010
jlauro said:

100ms lag? That's only 10 FPS!

That better be worse case not typical.  No air guitar at that rate of input.

"480p@10Hz should be enough for everybody", Steve Ballmer.

 



Stwike him, Centuwion. Stwike him vewy wuffly! (Pontius Pilate, "Life of Brian")
A fart without stink is like a sky without stars.
TGS, Third Grade Shooter: brand new genre invented by Kevin Butler exclusively for Natal WiiToo Kinect. PEW! PEW-PEW-PEW!   


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JaggedSac on 08 January 2010
drkohler said:
JaggedSac said:

Is Natal using TOF?  I read they are just reading the light intensity reflected back from the IR bursts.

Hmm you got me there. I have to think a while to figure out if that is actually possible at all, considering the reflectivity of a volume element changes with angle of illumination. Just think of a mirror cube that rotates at a fixed axis in front of the camera. The reflected ir light would vary from 0% to 100% with the cube constantly at the same distance. That would refute your idea..

Well, it wasn't my idea, I read it here, so I figured they would be right...

"A player standing anywhere between 0.8 and 4 metres from Natal is illuminated with infrared light. A monochrome video camera records how much of that light they reflect, using the brightness of the signal to approximate their distance from the device and capture their movements in 3D."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527426.800-microsofts-bodysensing-buttonbusting-controller.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=tech



Alby_da_Wolf on 09 January 2010
JaggedSac said:
drkohler said:
WereKitten said:
JaggedSac said:

I don't think Natal can distinguish fingers anyway.  It can measure where the arm is pointing.  My question is whether it is a cube with volume of 4 cm?  Or is it a cube with 4 cm on each side?

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.

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.

Is Natal using TOF?  I read they are just reading the light intensity reflected back from the IR bursts.  I thought TOF based it on the time it took and not light intensity.  I am assuming they would correlate, but TOF is probably more expensive and accurate.

I read somewhere it does... Intensity based systems may be less expensinve, but their accuracy may be disturbed by countless factors in an unknown environment (in the robotic meaning), as are every users' living rooms.

Given this latest news, and having SPE's that are perfect for the job and not fully exploited by games yet, Sony could end up with smoother, and more easily applicable to games, SW only solution for its camera. It's quite likely that Sony knew this before us and this would explain why they were so quiet about their own system, waiting for MS hype bubble to burst. Natal camera is more advanced, this is undeniable, but crippling it MS risks making its user experience more awkward than simpler solutions' ones. What's worst for MS is that this way it not only uncovered its best cards, but it discarded some of them instead of playing them. If MS wanted to be first and unchallenged, it had to accept to lose some money, initially, did it expect other companies to take the burden in place of it to bring the chips to mass production and commodity cost and still be first on the market?



Stwike him, Centuwion. Stwike him vewy wuffly! (Pontius Pilate, "Life of Brian")
A fart without stink is like a sky without stars.
TGS, Third Grade Shooter: brand new genre invented by Kevin Butler exclusively for Natal WiiToo Kinect. PEW! PEW-PEW-PEW!   


drkohler on 09 January 2010
JaggedSac said:
drkohler said:
JaggedSac said:

Is Natal using TOF?  I read they are just reading the light intensity reflected back from the IR bursts.

Hmm you got me there. I have to think a while to figure out if that is actually possible at all, considering the reflectivity of a volume element changes with angle of illumination. Just think of a mirror cube that rotates at a fixed axis in front of the camera. The reflected ir light would vary from 0% to 100% with the cube constantly at the same distance. That would refute your idea..

Well, it wasn't my idea, I read it here, so I figured they would be right...

"A player standing anywhere between 0.8 and 4 metres from Natal is illuminated with infrared light. A monochrome video camera records how much of that light they reflect, using the brightness of the signal to approximate their distance from the device and capture their movements in 3D."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527426.800-microsofts-bodysensing-buttonbusting-controller.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=tech

I'm just guessing if they really used such an imprecise technique, then it would not have made sense for MS to buy that israely company that wanted to sell their tof system "for under $100". On the other hand, it would be nothing but an EyeToy*2 which would explain its low price.



JaggedSac on 09 January 2010
drkohler said:
JaggedSac said:

Well, it wasn't my idea, I read it here, so I figured they would be right...

"A player standing anywhere between 0.8 and 4 metres from Natal is illuminated with infrared light. A monochrome video camera records how much of that light they reflect, using the brightness of the signal to approximate their distance from the device and capture their movements in 3D."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527426.800-microsofts-bodysensing-buttonbusting-controller.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=tech

I'm just guessing if they really used such an imprecise technique, then it would not have made sense for MS to buy that israely company that wanted to sell their tof system "for under $100". On the other hand, it would be nothing but an EyeToy*2 which would explain its low price.

Well, we shall see.