ok.. since you seem to be a little short of working brain cells, let's do some wag math. Suppose a "body configuration" consists of only 12 data points a processor/fpga has to find and "evaluate" and store back per frame. We need about (1 trillion) * 30fps * 12 data points * 3clock cycles (an incredibly fast fpga)= roughly 1000 trillion operation per second. That's several 1000 XBox processors running in parallel. Where do you fit that into your Xbox? (What really happened is that the developers _evaluated millions of frames_ (with possibly "trillions of body configuration") and condensed the results into an AI database. Wasn't there something said about resulting in 31 body configurations?).

It is what it is. While a 10-15% loss of CPU power isn't insignificant, developers can work around it. I'll reserve judgement until natal comes out.

Good for market penetration and profitability, bad for the consumer. I'll keep an open mind for now.

 lets use a bit of common sense.

He says very clearly, " The 3d camera available for the first time gives it the information to the distance of every point on the body ( later another employee clarifies this as trillions of times every frame and 30 frames a second ). But it doesn't give an interpretation of where the limbs are and what angle the joints are at. So for that we need to build software. The person 'confirming' Natal is the one evaluating trillions of body configurations a second is 'Andrew Fitzgibbon'. Clearly saying " What Natal does is effectively evaluating trillions of body configurations a second."

Now. it doesn't take a high IQ to notice that the software is confirmed as doing interpretation of where the limbs are and joint angles. Thats it. According to the article in OP Software is doing all the body configuration calculations also. Well this video 'VERY CLEARLY' dispels that as total BS.

Have a nice day. :)

Trillions of body configurations per second?

Only if they mean in the sense that my pocket calculator evaluates trillions of numbers per second (i.e. 2+2 equals 4, not 1,2,3,5 or any of the remaining trillions of numbers that the calculator can reach).

Sounds like they mean total processing power to me.  So one of the dedicated threads will be using most of a core for around 10ms each frame.

I gave them some leeway since total processing power would also include the GPU... it's not a very precise statement, but I agree with your interpretation.

had he said, "what the natal hardware does..." i would completely agree with you but he doesn't.  this is such a high level explanation/commericial that i don't think there is anything about that statement that clearly indicates the exact location of where any calculations are being crunched.

Really with taking certain elements out, it eliminates what sets it apart from all the other systems. Man that sucks for 360 glad I own a PS3....

Makes sense to me.

If this to remain a 360 addon vs a nextgen controller then its costs must be as low as possible to a huge number of existing customers purchase it. With a game included, I would expect this to be $100 at a maximum. That game must also have the kind of pull that Wii Sports or Wii Fit have. This doesn't mean it needs to be a *casual* game, just have that kind of unique must have appeal to it.

However, this does mean that games like Gears2 won't be doable, assuming these latest games do push the hardware to the limits as devs have stated. Something else will have to be scaled back to allow for the cpu to do both tasks appropriately.

This will be an interesting year to see what MS and Sony finally put out in the motion sphere. E3 is going to be EXCITING!